The Café Royal Cultural Foundation NYC has awarded a 2026 Spring Visual Grant to Hilda Shen for her upcoming exhibition  “Ever Beyond”.

“Ever Beyond” is a solo exhibition of recent and new sculptures, which opens at the Museum of Chinese in America in October 2026.  The exhibition also includes several related prints in the installation.

The work addresses ideas of landscape, memory, temporality and motion as expressed materially through clay, and on paper. Referencing antiquity and craft tradition, Chinese landscape painting and Shen’s own personal history of travel and wanderings, the works affect a sensation of moving through- negotiating states of interiority/ exteriority.

In clay, its sturdy, gravity-bound characteristics give way to a heightened, multivalent condition of possibility. Suggestions of mountains, wind gusts, flowing water and other natural forms are rendered into surfaces alongside abstract passages, architectural fragments and biomorphic accretions. Negotiating a condition between head space and physical space, the works exist both as resolutely material evocations of transformation and as vessels of the ineffable. 

Hilda Shen has a B.A. in East Asian Studies/Music from Oberlin College, a Certificate in Sculpture from the Pennsylvania Academy of Fine Arts and an MFA from CUNY, Queens College. Her work has been exhibited throughout the New York area and nationally, and is in private collections in the United States, Belgium, and Beijing. Shen’s large wall pieces have been installed at WaveHill, the Tenri Cultural Center, China2000, the Smithsonian Flushing Town Hall in Queens, and Riverdale Country School in the Bronx. Shen has also acted in Public Hearing, a film by James Kienitz Wilkins, which premiered in the USA at MoMA/PS1 in 2013, and in Wilkins’ Common Carrier at BAM CinemaFest in 2017. Reviews have appeared in The New York Times, The Brooklyn Rail, ArtAsiaPacific, ARTnews, and Two Coats of Paint.  A recent solo exhibition at Starr Suites (Brooklyn, NY) in May 2026 will be followed by a solo presentation at The Museum of Chinese in America, NY, in October 2026. 
 

Please visit Hilda’s Website and Instagram for more information.