I’m Grace Jin 金睿思 (she/her), a Chinese American visual artist based in the Bay Area. I received a BA in Global Affairs from Yale College in 2020, a Masters in International Development from the Graduate Institute Geneva in 2021, and am currently a first-year at Stanford School of Medicine.
Born in the US but raised by my grandparents in rural Zhejiang, China, I grew up learning calligraphy and ink painting from my grandmother. I have since studied with artists at Yale, Stanford, the Art Students League of New York, as well as in Taiwan and Spain.
I make art about and for the Chinese diaspora - by collecting cultural evidence from history, poetry, literature, dinner tables, WeChat threads, Chinatown visits, propaganda posters or espionage balloons; excavating memories, family albums, and ancestral traditions to tell intersecting narratives of diasporic grief, nostalgia, and joy. I am interested in tracing intergenerational trauma passed down through transnational kinship, separation, and mental illness, and in doing so, bear witness to the ways that decoupling military superpowers wound soft human bodies.
My practice is grounded in a pure love for discovery, as well as the revelatory and healing powers of art in making pain softer to bear, turning facts into feeling, inviting anger to dance, and opening portals toward community, radical solidarity, transformative justice, and liberatory reclamation.
