He Sen is a Chinese painter born in 1968 in Kaiyuan, Yunnan Province, who lives and works in Beijing. He graduated from the Normal Department of the Sichuan Academy of Fine Arts, Chongqing, in 1989, and came up within the distinctively expressionist Sichuan school associated with his mentor Zhang Xiaogang.

He Sen first became known in the 1990s for melancholy portraits of young women — dreamy, lingerie-clad figures cradling soft toys in spare interiors — that caught the unfulfilled desires of a generation coming of age in a newly consumerist China. He has since turned from the figure to Chinese history and landscape, reinventing classical ink painting in oil: working brush against palette knife, he builds spatula-laid relief and thins his strokes to the translucency of ink, replacing figures with bamboo and pine so that Western material renders an Eastern sensibility.

He Sen is currently showing in Black Myth at White Rabbit Gallery, Sydney (2026), with paintings from his Journey to the West series, and in 2024 he held the solo exhibition Journey to the South at Redbase Art Sydney. He has exhibited widely across China, Australia, Europe, Asia and the United States, and his work is held in major collections including M+, Hong Kong; the White Rabbit Collection, Sydney; the National Art Museum of China and Shanghai Art Museum; the Fukuoka Asian Art Museum, Japan; and the Deutsche Bank Collection, Germany.