In Old Cape Cod at Night Gallery, Susan Chen expands her painterly gaze from the intimate specificity of community portraiture into the liminal grandeur of the American coastal landscape. Best known for her empathetic renderings of human subjects with portraits rooted in identity, memory, and social negotiation, Chen here turns her formidable syntax toward the mutable shorelines of Cape Cod. A debut exhibition of her foray into landscapes, she conjures a body of work that is at once an observational diary and an ecological elegy.
Anchored in a decade of repeated summer visits, this suite of plein air paintings finds Chen attuned to the restless flux of salt marsh and Atlantic light. Rather than settling into traditional notions of coastal serenity, her canvases pulse with atmospheric charge. We see wind-ruffled grass as it quivers against saturated skies, hydrangeas blooming with tactile intensity, and pathways twisting into less familiar thresholds between land and sea. In these works, landscape is not a backdrop but an interlocutor. Landscape is a lived, shifting archive of time, erosion, and human attachment.
The show’s largest canvas, Sunset at the Cape (2025), encapsulates this tension. Beneath a horizon that hums with late-day color, Chen places herself at an easel, embedding herself as witness, bearing alert attention to the mutable shore. Wild turkeys and stray moments become more than anecdotes; they are ephemeral companions in a practice rooted in return, presence, and the weathering of place.
In Old Cape Cod, Chen’s brush moves from the politics of individual faces to the politics of place. In this second solo show with Night Gallery, what emerges is a deeply felt cartography of experience. The coastline mutates into a repository of memory and urgency in an era of ecological precarity. Here, Chen reveals a painterly voice increasingly capacious, where landscape becomes both subject and ethical encounter.
The exhibition leaves the viewer with a heightened awareness of time’s slow accumulation and the fragile intimacy between observation and belonging. Chen’s landscapes do not simply depict Cape Cod, but draw the body into a shared act of looking, where atmosphere, memory, and ecological unease quietly converge for each of us, lingering as both solace and summons. —Charles Moore
