Ruonan Shen (b. 2001) is a visual artist and photographer based in London. She is currently a student in University of Arts London in Interior Design. Working primarily with conceptual portraiture, Shen’s practice explores the aesthetics of identity, performance, and visual tension within constructed spaces.
Her recent works engage with gender expression and transformation, focusing on China’s emerging drag scene as a lens through which to question the boundaries of beauty, strength, and self-presentation. Shen creates highly staged environments that balance intimacy and control, presence and absence.
Drawing from minimal aesthetics, theatrical artifice, and emotional ambiguity, Shen’s photographs challenge normative visual codes while inviting moments of stillness and reflection. As an emerging artist, she is interested in photography not as documentation, but as reconstruction—a deliberate and quiet act of image-making on their own terms.
Project Statement
Alienation of Home
The project is effectively convey my journey and changing relationship with the concept of “home”. The “Home” section powerfully captures the bittersweet nostalgia of returning to a familiar space that no longer feels like a true home, with details like the “whispers in my ear, the empty refrigerator, and the stairs that I will fall down at any time” evoking a tangible sense of displacement and alienation. It’s mirroring my own feelings of being caught between past and present. I have constructed several closed spaces in this group of images, almost ‘theatre-like’, trying to make the body echo the space. The movements of the young girl characters are soft and rigid. They are dressed in lace, slippers, and pink clothes, as if they were playing a kind of ‘prescribed gentleness’, which is not by choice but by some kind of social training from childhood. The self-covering on the stairs is a rejection of the external gaze and a resistance to ‘being cute’;
The gaze in front of the fridge is a freeze of emptiness, desire, and waiting, rejecting the idea that women must be docile and passive.
The girls in these images are not angry or rebellious, but they are waiting for a kind of break – they could be me or many others when they were children.
I hope to capture something in this body of work: ‘ you can’t say it out loud, but you feel it all the time’.
How an invisible gender expectation silently shapes women’s daily emotions and makes them feel suffocated or alienated in the details of ordinary life.
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