Catherine Chen

Biography

Catherine Chen is a visual artist based in Boston whose practice spans painting, printmaking, and mixed-media installation. Drawing from family archives, dream fragments, and the sensory experience of seasonal change, her work explores memory, time, and the emotional textures woven into everyday life.

Chen studied Fine Arts at Parsons School of Design and is currently pursuing her graduate studies at the School of the Museum of Fine Arts at Tufts University (SMFA at Tufts). She has previously worked at MoMA, Song Art Museum (China, Beijing), and Today Art Museum (China, Beijing)—experiences that continue to shape her research-driven methodology and her sensitivity to image, material, and personal history.

Artist Statement

My work begins in the quiet space between memory and imagination, where dreams surface in fragments—familiar yet uncertain, intimate yet slightly out of reach. I have been painting recurring dream images: a small image that appears again and again in my sleep. These motifs return to me with subtle shifts, carrying emotions I can’t fully articulate. Painting becomes a way of approaching them slowly, of spending time with something that exists only momentarily before dissolving.

Repetition is central to my practice. I often paint the same dream from the same angle multiple times, allowing the differences to reveal themselves—slight shifts in color, tension, softness, or atmosphere. These variations mirror the instability of memory: each time we recall a dream, we change it a little without fully realizing it. The dream is never fixed, and neither is the painting. Each version becomes a record of who I was in the moment of making it.

The subject of my work is not the object itself, but the emotional distance between remembering and forgetting. In my dreams, everyday objects become carriers of feeling; they hold tenderness, loneliness, comfort, and childhood traces. By isolating these objects and painting them repeatedly, I treat them as quiet emotional anchors within a shifting internal landscape.

My paintings are subtle, slow, and introspective. They do not offer a straightforward narrative. Instead, they invite viewers into a space of ambiguity—where the same image reappears, never identical, always changing. In this way, the work becomes less about depicting a dream and more about understanding how dreams live inside us: unstable, recurring, and constantly rewritten.

Ultimately, my practice is an ongoing attempt to hold onto something that cannot be held. Through painting, I revisit the edges of memory, acknowledging its fragility while embracing the beauty of its constant transformation.

Website: articath.com

Instagram: @cathart10