10 Questions with Linda He

Linda He (b. 2003) is a visual artist based in San Francisco, California. Born into an artistic family in China, she was raised in a culturally rich environment before relocating abroad at a young age. She is currently pursuing her BFA in Illustration at California College of the Arts.

Her practice explores the intersection of individual experience, emotional memory, and the complexities of intimacy and social interaction. Working primarily with acrylic on canvas, she creates visual spaces that merge structured composition with visceral emotion. Her paintings often combine abstraction with symbolic figuration and bold contrasts, capturing the nuanced rhythms of closeness, hesitation, and release within personal relationships.

She has been recognised with the 2025 All College Honours Award and the HAVC Award in African and Diasporic Studies at California College of the Arts, and has been consistently named to the Dean’s List. Her work has been exhibited in Times Square (New York City), the Grand Palais in Paris as part of the Art Capital Salon, and at Salesforce Tower in San Francisco.

@lindahe_art

ARTIST STATEMENT

In a world that demands coherence, presence, and emotional transparency, Linda He turns toward the overflow. Her work navigates the weight of too many roles, too many expectations, too many emotional cues – where performance bleeds into intimacy, and identity becomes an ongoing negotiation.

This is not abstraction as escape, but as accumulation. Linda He’s paintings do not empty space – they crowd it. Colour becomes pressure, gesture becomes hesitation, and forms seem to hover between blooming and collapse. What emerges is not a single voice, but a field of emotional noise – layered, unstable, and unresolved.

Rather than offering catharsis or clarity, the artist lingers on contradiction. Her visual language traces the emotional residue of becoming someone for others, of always being slightly too much or not enough. In this work, softness is not passivity, and ambiguity is not avoidance; they are methods of survival.

Against the demand to appear healed, whole, or legible, the artist’s practice offers a different kind of resistance – quiet but persistent, heavy with tension yet open to interruption. Her images don’t instruct; they ask the viewer to stay, to slow down, and to feel their way through.

Too Much to Hold Together, Acrylic on canvas, 24x32 in, 2024 © Linda He

INTERVIEW

Let’s start with your background. How did growing up in an artistic family in China shape your early interest in making art?

Art wasn’t something rare in my childhood – it was everywhere. I come from a long line of people who work in the arts. My mom is a contemporary artist, and our home was full of creative energy. While many kids were told not to draw in the margins or read too many picture books, I was the opposite – I had endless access to illustrated books, sketchpads, and space to imagine. Conversations about aesthetics or ideas happened at the dinner table. It wasn’t formal, but it was constant.
One of the strongest memories I have is how obsessed I was with cartoons. I could watch Tom and Jerry for twelve hours straight – no exaggeration. I’d wake up at 2 AM just to rewatch episodes, and instead of stopping me, my mom supported it. She saw it as something meaningful. I wasn’t just watching – I was copying, pausing the screen, trying to understand movement, timing, and how emotion could live in a line. That was my first art school, in a way.

Or Else, We Bloom, Acrylic on canvas, 18x24 in, 2024 © Linda He

What drew you to study illustration, and how has that influenced your painting practice?

I didn’t know exactly what I wanted to study when I applied to art school. Around that time, I had the opportunity to learn from Kim Jung Gi, the legendary Korean illustrator known for his spontaneous, large-scale ink drawings. His way of working was fearless and fluid, and watching him draw felt like watching thought turn directly into image. It was my first time seeing how drawing could carry both control and freedom – how it could be precise and emotional at the same time.
Studying with him changed the way I understood visual language. He taught me not just how to draw, but how to see – how to observe, simplify, exaggerate, and hold a whole world inside a single line. That experience deeply influenced my decision to study illustration.
Now, three years into the program, I still value that foundation. Illustration taught me how to build structure, how tocommunicate visually. But over time, I’ve become more interested in what happens when structure starts to break down.Painting allows for ambiguity, for emotional contradiction, for unresolved tension. So my shift toward painting wasn’t a rejection of illustration – it was a continuation. Illustration gave me the tools. Painting gives me the space to question them.

Why did you choose painting and, more specifically, acrylic on canvas as your primary medium?

Acrylic is fast. It doesn’t let you hesitate too much. That speed forces me to commit, even when I don’t feel ready, which is often where the most emotionally honest work happens. It also builds up in layers, which fits the way I think: messily, over time, full of contradiction.
Canvas pushes back. It holds memory. It can carry pressure and softness in the same breath. That matters to me because I’m often working with themes like emotional overflow, dissonance, and fragmentation. Lately, I’ve also started experimenting with other materials to create more texture, letting surfaces feel more like skin or scars. And I’m interested in working large-scale on paper again too, letting the physical act of drawing become something immersive and bodily.

Tell us a bit about your creative process. How do you go from the first idea to the final outcome?

It usually starts with something that lingers – a social interaction, a strange silence, a moment that felt too charged or too empty. I don’t sketch it out in a literal way. It’s more like I carry the feeling around until it starts to take form through movement, colour, and spatial tension.
I often overload the painting at some point – visually or emotionally – and then spend time sitting with the discomfort. I don’t rush to “fix” things. Sometimes the mistake is the point. What I’m after isn’t resolution – it’s a kind of atmospheric truth. The piece is done when it feels like it’s breathing its own air, even if that air is heavy.

Your work often blends abstraction with symbolic figuration. What attracts you to this mix? And what does it help you to communicate?

I’m drawn to abstraction because it lets things stay ambiguous. But I can’t let go of the body – it keeps coming back in my work, even if fragmented, implied, or barely there. I think that reflects how we experience ourselves: not as whole, unified beings, but in pieces, in gestures, in passing impressions.
Symbolic figuration gives me an anchor. A bent limb, a tangled form – it’s not meant to be decoded, but felt. I’m not painting stories; I’m painting the atmosphere of pressure, longing, tension. And the mix of figuration and abstraction mirrors how identity often works – visible, performative on the outside, but much more blurry and layered on the inside.

How do you translate feelings like hesitation, pressure, or emotional overload into colour and form?

For me, those feelings show up in how things relate–or don’t relate–spatially. Hesitation might be a gesture that breaks off. Pressure might be a form that crowds another, or a colour that feels too dense. Emotional overload often arrives as visual noise – too many marks, things pushing against each other.
I don’t try to illustrate emotion, but I do think my brushwork carries emotional weight. The way a surface is scraped, or how a shape refuses to finish – it all speaks to the feeling of living in a body under constant performance, always adapting, always slightly off balance.

Something’s Trying to Bloom, Acrylic on canvas, 18x24 in, 2024 © Linda He

Suspended In Presence, Acrylic on canvas, 24x32 in, 2024 © Linda He

Do certain shapes, colours, or symbols appear often in your work? If so, what do they represent to you?

There are forms that return without me planning them: distorted limbs, circular loops, soft barriers, wires, or even pillow-like shapes. They often carry double meanings – something comforting can also feel smothering. Something soft might actually hold tension.
I’m interested in ambiguity. A shape might look like a shoulder, or a folded blanket, or a metaphor for emotional labour.That openness isn’t a lack of clarity – it’s a space of complexity. These recurring forms act like emotional stand-ins. They’re placeholders for things I can’t name but need to keep returning to.

How do you hope viewers feel or reflect when they stand in front of your paintings?

I hope they don’t feel rushed to “get it.” My work isn’t about decoding; it’s about staying with something that feels unresolved. If someone slows down and notices that they feel something, but can’t quite say what, it’s working.
We’re used to living in hyper-visible, hyper-curated spaces – especially online. Everything is meant to be explained, posted, and performed. My paintings resist that. They ask for patience, for feeling something before labelling it. I want viewers to feel suspended for a moment, like they’re in a space where contradiction is allowed.

Speaking of your work, it has been presented in prestigious venues around the world. What was it like seeing your work shown in places like Times Square or the Grand Palais in Paris?

It was surreal, especially because so much of my work comes from quiet, internal spaces. Seeing it blown up on the screen in Times Square – among flashing ads and noise – was overwhelming in a good way. That piece was part of a public exhibition curated by a gallery, and the idea of something intimate entering such a loud, public space felt strangely fitting. It was a kind of interruption.
At the Grand Palais in Paris, the experience was different. That space holds so much history – it’s a site that has shownwork for over a hundred years. Being part of the Salon felt like stepping into a larger conversation with artists from all over the world. I was grateful to exhibit alongside such a wide range of practices and to feel how my work translatedacross cultures and contexts.

The Stage is Already Set, Acrylic on canvas, 36x48 in, 2024 © Linda He

Lastly, looking ahead, which directions or new projects do you see yourself taking in the coming years?

I’m currently thinking a lot about surface and material, especially how painting can suggest pressure or fragmentation not just through image, but through texture. I’m interested in layering different materials onto canvas and paper, building a visual language that feels both bodily and architectural.
At the same time, I’m also curious about time-based media. I recently completed a public light-based animation project that was presented at the top of the Salesforce Tower in San Francisco – one of the most iconic buildings on the West Coast. The work was featured as part of a large-scale LED light installation that transforms the tower’s crown into a platform for public art. Being included in such a prominent, high-visibility cultural initiative pushed me to think differently about how artwork communicates at a civic scale – how emotional tone shifts when seen collectively, across a skyline, rather than privately.
Conceptually, my upcoming body of work continues to explore the tension between performance and presence. I’m particularly interested in how, in our hyper-visible, hyper-connected culture, emotions become not just expressed but managed, packaged, performed, even policed. I’m thinking about how this pressure to be transparent, optimised, and always “okay” becomes a subtle kind of self-punishment.
But rather than rejecting that entirely, I want my work to offer small moments of resistance, not through loud opposition, but through slowness, ambiguity, and the right to remain unresolved. I believe that emotional nuance is still a form of strength – and that protecting complexity, in an age of constant clarity, is a quiet but powerful stance.

Artist’s Talk

Al-Tiba9 Interviews is a promotional platform for artists to articulate their vision and engage them with our diverse readership through a published art dialogue. The artists are interviewed by Mohamed Benhadj, the founder & curator of Al-Tiba9, to highlight their artistic careers and introduce them to the international contemporary art scene across our vast network of museums, galleries, art professionals, art dealers, collectors, and art lovers across the globe.

Apply for an interview >>

Related Interviews