New Exhibit: Untranslated Things, by Junhan Shen

“I paint things that cannot be held for long: fireworks at their brightest point, silt carried away by water, and rifting plants. My work focuses on temporary states and subtle shifts that exist between movement and stillness, attachment and disappearance. Through painting and mixed media, I use these images to think about impermanence and how a fleeting moment can remain as a trace.”

--  Junhan Shen

Untranslated Things comprises a series of six large-scale abstract paintings, including a diptych and a triptych, developed through engagement with literary texts selected in collaboration with the staff of Gottesman Libraries. This project explores “impermanence” in literature and how viewers reframe interpretations within a shared space, allowing meaning to remain open and evolving.

The project examines the relationship between the idea “impermanence” in literature and how it manifests in visual representation. It also considers how audience responses may extend or reframe these interpretations within a shared space.

A small group of literary works were selected to show texts that engage different structures or types of impermanence. The selected texts address themes such as shifting identity, migration, instability of memory, and transformation of relationships.

Each text serves as a conceptual starting point for a painting that translates structures of change into color and material processes, including layering, accumulation, absorption, erasure, and reworking. The process is central: the work evolves through continuous modification rather than execution of a predetermined image. 

A video documents the transformation of Junhan Shen's artwork which is on display through November 13th, with accompanying literary texts:

• The Land of Mundanity, by Malaysian-Chinese author Li Zishu (originally published in 2020)
• Invisible Cities, by Italian novelist and short story writer Italo Calvino (1972)
• Demian: The Story of Sinclair Lewis' Youth, by German-Swiss poet and novelist Herman Hesse (1919)
• On the Origin of Species by Means of Natural Selection, by English naturalist, geologist, and botanist Charles Darwin (1859)
• The Tempest, by English playwright, poet, and actor William Shakespeare (1623)
• A Midsummer Night's Dream, also by William Shakespeare (1600)

Artist Reflection

"A text can stay the same for many years, but every person reads it differently. A sentence might remind someone of a memory.

Untranslated Things looks at how reading can become a starting point for painting. I am interested in the feelings, sensations, and ambiguities that come from reading, and how they can become part of a painting. The works in this project come from texts that deal with identity, migration, memory, relationships, and impermanence.

My practice begins with reading. I draw from remembered nature, poetry, and my inner and spiritual world, transforming these experiences into a personal visual language. I respond to what a text makes me remember, feel, or imagine, rather than to what it directly describes. During this process, I often write down quotes, words, and associations in notebooks, but I rarely make sketches. I prefer to keep both the process and the outcome open and unexpected. For me, a predetermined sketch can sometimes limit the possibilities that emerge through the process of painting. Currently, I paint with acrylic diluted heavily with water and build the surface through layers of oil glaze. This process allows me to quickly capture an initial thought while keeping the image fluid and changeable. The painting develops alongside my reading: I often return to the text while working, looking for new ways of understanding it."

-- Junhan Shen

Artworks 

The Land of Mundanity
Acrylic, oil, and color powder on canvas
60" x 48"
2026

Quote:

Because it rained so frequently, many of life's important events seemed to happen in the rain. Unfolded today, those memories still feel damp. Even when dry, they are like water-soaked books, with pages full of ripples, never to be smoothed again.
-- Li Zishu

Invisible Cities
Acrylic, oil, and color powder on canvas 
Triptych, 60" x 36" x 3 panels
2026

Quote:

You walk for days among trees and among stones. Rarely does the eye light on a thing, and then only when it has recognized that thing as the sign of another thing: a print in the sand indicates the tiger’s passage; a marsh announces a vein of water; the hibiscus flower, the end of winter. All the rest is silent and interchangeable; trees and stones are only what they are.
-- Italo Calvino

Demian: The Story of Single Lewis' Youth
Acrylic, oil, and color powder on canvas
60" x 48" 
2026

Quote:

The bird fights its way out of the egg. The egg is the world. Who would be born must first destroy a world.
— Hermann Hesse

On the Origin of Species 
Acrylic, oil, and color powder on canva 
Diptych, 60" x 40 " x 2 panels
2026

Quote: 

Thus, from the war of nature, from famine and death, the most exalted object which we are capable of conceiving, namely, the production of the higher animals, directly follows. There is grandeur in this view of life, with its several powers, having been originally breathed into a few forms or into one; and that, whilst this planet has gone cycling on according to the fixed law of gravity, from so simple a beginning endless forms most beautiful and most wonderful have been, and are being, evolved.

-- Charles Darwin

The Tempest
Acrylic, oil, and color powder on canva
60" x 48"
2026  

Quote:

Our revels now are ended. These our actors,
As I foretold you, were all spirits and
Are melted into air, into thin air;
And like the baseless fabric of this vision,
The cloud-capped towers, the gorgeous palaces,
The solemn temples, the great globe itself,
Yea, all which it inherit, shall dissolve,
And, like this insubstantial pageant faded,
Leave not a rack behind. We are such stuff
As dreams are made on, and our little life
Is rounded with a sleep. 

(Prospero, Act IV, scene 1)

-- William Shakespeare

A Midsummer Night’s Dream 
Acrylic, oil, and color powder on canvas
60" x 48" 
2026

Quote:

I know a bank where the wild thyme blows,
Where oxlips and the nodding violet grows,
Quite overcanopied with luscious woodbine,
With sweet muskroses, and with eglantine.
There sleeps Titania sometime of the night,
Lulled in these flowers with dances and delight.
(Oberon, Act II, scene 1)

--William Shakespeare

Biography

Junhan Shen is a New York–based Chinese artist. She received her BFA in Illustration from the School of Visual Arts (2024), where she developed a foundation in drawing and image-making. She completed her MA in Art and Art Education at Teachers College, Columbia University (May 2026), where her research focused on art education, studio art, and psychology.

Her work has been exhibited at Gottesman Libraries, Teachers College, Columbia University (The Querent, 2026), among other group exhibitions in Melbourne, Shanghai, Beijing, New York. In addition to her studio practice, she has experience in educational museum settings including MoMA and The Jewish Museum, contributing to public-facing programs and teaching initiatives. These experiences inform her interest in how visual practice operates within broader systems of knowledge and public engagement.

After realistic drawing for many years, Junhan has turned to abstract large-scale painting. She focuses on fleeting and changeable states, approaching impermanence through poetic and sensitive imagery. Junhan's painting is grounded in material transformation. Through layering, absorption, staining, erasure, and reworking, her paintings develop over time, allowing forms to emerge, shift, and dissolve. The surface becomes a site where change is enacted rather than represented, and where meaning arises through the process of making, rather than a predetermined image.

Acknowledgements

Untranslated Things is a collaborative art and literature project by 2026 commissioned artist Junhan Shen, developed together with library staff who contributed recommendations and thoughts on classic texts that explore the theme of impermanence: Jennifer Govan, Library Director and Senior Librarian; Conrad Lochner, Special and Digital Collections Librarian; Victoria Santamorena, Processing Archivist; and Kai Oh, Library Associate for Art and Design, with additional thanks to Meryl Jefferson, Manager of Operations, for coordinating exhibition supplies.

The exhibition is designed by Kai Oh (MFA, Columbia University) and made possible through the continuing generosity of The Myers Foundations.

Where: Offit Gallery
When: October 2 - November 13
Opening Reception: Thursday, October 8, 5-6pm
Artist Talk: Thursday, October 29, 5-6pm

Poster Image from Original Artwork, Courtesy of Junhan Shen:

Demian
Acrylic, oil, and color powder on canvas
60" x 48" 
2026