The Armory Show: Lucy Kim & John Shen

For Armory 2026, Praise Shadows Art Gallery will present a duo booth by Lucy Kim and John Shen. Lucy Kim, an artist based in Boston, works across sculpture, painting, and biological media to interrogate the habits of seeing. Included in the booth will be a new expansion of her sculptural paintings, which Kim creates by painting on resin molds. The surfaces she casts from includes shorelines, corn kernels, and constructed figures. Motivated by photography’s dominance in visual culture, Kim’s combination of patterned paintings atop direct casts translates the moment of photographic capture, yet upends the eye’s learned process of comprehension. New Haven artist John Shen works across lens-based and hybrid forms to examine the influence of images and how they contribute to inherited narratives. The booth will feature photographs from his Straw Inscription' series, a body of work created by capturing portraits and still-life at low-resolution using a self-made camera that consists of 28,000 hand-glued black, plastic straws. The multimedia piece, After Image, will also be featured, directly from its inclusion in a major exhibition, The Aldrich Decennial: I am what is around me. This installation comprises a 14-inch CRT television monitor with an inscribed image of his mother that plays a video of Shen undergoing a Thematic Apperception Test. Through After Image, Shen explores both external and internal mechanisms of memory and self-reflection.

Lucy Kim (b. 1978, Seoul, South Korea; based in Cambridge, MA) is an interdisciplinary artist who works across painting, sculpture, and biological media, with forms ranging from low-relief sculptural paintings to large-scale installations of bacterial melanin prints. She embraces distortion as a tool to deconstruct how we see what we see, and by extension, the complicated relationship between truth and sight. 

Kim is a recipient of the Howard Foundation Fellowship (2024), Creative Capital Award (2022), Mass Cultural Council Grant (2019), ICA Boston James and Audrey Foster Prize (2017), Artadia Award (2014), and the MacDowell Fellowship (2007). From 2018 to 2021, she was an artist-in-residence at the Broad Institute of MIT and Harvard. Kim has exhibited her work at the Henry Art Gallery at the University of Washington, Seattle, WA; Moody Center for the Arts at Rice University, Houston, TX; Institute of Contemporary Art, Boston, MA; Institute of Fine Arts at New York University, New York, NY; deCordova Sculpture Park and Museum, Lincoln, MA; Tufts University Art Gallery, Medford, MA; Tang Teaching Museum at Skidmore, Saratoga Springs, NY; among others. Her work is in the collections of the MIT List Visual Arts Center, ICA Boston, KADIST collection, Museum of Fine Arts Boston, and the New York Public Library. She received her BFA from the Rhode Island School of Design (Painting, 2001), and her MFA from the Yale University School of Art (Painting and Printmaking, 2007). Kim is Associate Professor of Art at Boston University.

John Shen is a multidisciplinary artist born in China, raised in New Zealand, and currently based in New Haven, Connecticut. Shen completed his MFA in Photography at the Yale School of Art and earned his BFA in Photography and Painting from the Rhode Island School of Design.

Shen's practice explores the nexus between the image and object, approaching photographs as material events rather than mere representations. Through experimental, research based processes, he engages photographic history and material as sites where memory is stored, distorted and reactivated. His projects often begin with a specific apparatus, hand built or modified and are used to inscribe images onto physical substrates, testing the limits of memory and legibility. Shen's work is deeply interested in making the stakes of looking felt, to insist on tactility where images are consumed frictionlessly. Working across lens-based and hybrid forms, Shen treats technology as collaborator, using it to examine how images imprint themselves upon us and how inherited narratives are carried forward. Ultimately, his experimentations are a way of thinking through the intimacy of love, grief, memory, and myth.