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.