He Sen is an artist entirely committed to the medium of painting, which he uses to explore the human condition in his powerful and atmospheric works. He Sen is particularly concerned with the dilemmas facing China's youth as they grow up in a society that is changing so fast.

He Sen graduated from the painting department of the Sichuan academy of Fine Arts in 1989. The early 1990s saw him paint still lives, which, despite lacking a direct human presence, were filled with traces of the China's new "modern" youth: cassettes, cigarette packets, trainers. He Sen then began featuring people as his subject matter, culminating in a series of paintings depicting snapshots of brightly coloured and slightly surreal TV studios. Since these earlier works He Sen has abandoned the knife and started using the brush to depict his subjects, the details of his paintings are thus much finer and the surfaces smoother, giving the works a different feel.

He Sen has been painting young women and soft toys since 1998. The presence of teddy bears creates a tension between a certain childishness and the paraphernalia of adulthood that surround the girls. Eyes are clearly significant to He Sen: his first paintings on this theme series featured young women whose eyes were rubbed out, blurring their expressions. More recently He Sen has chosen to represent the eyes of the young women he paints, and their bored, melancholy or occasionally smiling expressions are rendered in striking detail. The "blurring" previously attained by the erasing of the eyes can now be seen in the blue-grey cigarette smoke that curls around their heads, or the shadows cast on the monochrome grey background. The soft toys still feature at times, negating the self-consciously grown-up poses of the models. Heavily made up and often provocative, He Sen's young women seem to be caught between childhood and fully fledged adult life.