About

Grace Qian is a Toronto-based artist working primarily in painting. She received her BFA with honors from the School of Visual Arts, New York, in 2024. Her work has been recognized by organizations including the Elizabeth Greenshields Foundation (2023) and the Canada Council for the Arts (2025). She was awarded the Monson Arts AiR Award (2024) and a full fellowship from the Vermont Studio Center (2025).

Qian’s practice examines everyday environments as contested sites where inherited cultural scripts are performed, resisted, and internalized. Through folded and shifting compositions, her paintings reconstruct moments of rupture to reveal how acts of remembering and inhabiting are conditioned by histories she did not choose but continues to carry. 

Photo by Yu Dong Young, 2025 NARS Foundation