I am Grace Jin 金睿思 (she/they/tā), an artist and medical student based in San Francisco. My work imagines collective healing in Chinese America——using oil paint, ink, rice paper, thread, tattoo guns, installations, and materials that connect ancient with future. Raised by my grandparents in Yueqing, a town in southeastern China, I grew up practicing calligraphy and ink painting with my grandmother. I have since studied with artists at Yale, Stanford, the Art Students League of New York, in Taiwan and Spain.
My practice, in art just as in medicine, grapples with mortality and existence——a quest to make pain softer to bear, invite anger to dance, and open portals toward collective liberation. I treat amnesia with remembrance, excavating family albums and ancestral rituals. I gather cultural evidence from traditional Chinese medicine manuals, propaganda posters and WeChat threads. By tracing kinships severed by mental illness, geopolitical anxiety, censorship and estrangement, I seek to collapse the borders between personal and political, and in the act of mourning, cultivate new communities around diasporic survival and radical worldbuilding.
