Homer Shew (b. 1990, Chicago) is a New York-based painter whose work probes the distance and intimacy between individuals and their communities. Since 2015, Shew has focused on portraits of Asian Americans and the Asian Diaspora community through a personal lens. A trenchant vision that lays bare the contradiction between the lived experience and identity of his subjects and the exoticized narratives often projected onto Asian Americans, Shew’s portraits lock the viewer’s gaze in an intimate exchange to identify something yet unknown, in the process of becoming.

Vividly painted, texturally rich, and charged with emotional sincerity, Shew’s portraits are often created out of deep connection with the subjects, through personal relationships, as well as intellectual bond. For his process, Shew spends ample time with his sitters, up to several hours—friends, strangers, mentors, and cultural figures such as writer Hua Hsu and critic Jia Tolentino—in their daily environments, photographs them, and uses the resulting portraits as source material. Each painting is rendered with a tender specificity that saliently addresses the humanity of the individual while countering the dehumanizing nature of contemporary life. 

The faces of Shew’s paintings invite attention and empathy. Public figures, such as fashion designer Brandon Blackwood and curator Herb Tam (Museum of Chinese in America, New York), are grounded in the familiar and the quotidian, imbued with a quiet power. The setting of the urban built environment is suffused with flora and greenery, gesturing at resilience and regeneration. Shew considers the proximate relationship between art and anthropology, as fields of knowledge that define what is ultimately human. His portraits operate at this intersection: each face and each story as an act of witnessing, wholly individual with a sense of communal belonging to a larger collectivity. They form Shew’s ongoing project in an attempt to depict every Asian American he encounters, a subject that the artist muses that his father once deemed “improper for oil painting,” as the domain of the Western gaze. Homer Shew received his Bachelor of Arts from Bard College in 2012.