Pauline Shaw is a multidisciplinary artist recognized for her large-scale felted tapestries that synthesize inquiries into the nature and limits of the body, cultural inheritance, science, and mysticism. Referencing the erasure of traditions that Shaw has experienced as a first-generation Asian American woman, her abstracted biomorphic imagery draws from her investigation into the relationships between embodied memory and its representation – interweaving MRI scans, the fragility of diasporic narratives, and the instabilities of identity through dually fluid and fragmentary compositions. Informed by global genealogies of craft, her minutely detailed works coordinate a dialogue between screenic representation and object-hood in the production of personal and public cognition.

Pauline Shaw lives and works in New York.
Previous exhibitions include: The Shed, New York (2021); Spurs, Beijing (2021) Half Gallery, New York (2020); Institute of Contemporary Arts Singapore (2019); Almine Rech, Paris (2019); Gagosian, Park & 75th, New York (2019); In lieu, Los Angeles (2019); The Jewish Museum, New York (2018), and BBQLA, Los Angeles (2016). Her work will be included in shows at Friends Indeed, San Francisco (2022) and Downs & Ross (2022).
Shaw has been an artist in residence at ISCP, New York (2020), and France Los Angeles Residency Exchange Program (2014). She completed her MFA at Columbia University in 2019 and received her BFA from Rhode Island School of Design in 2011.