International contemporary artist based in Mexico City
Faces of Isolation, 2020
Mixed media on paper
280 × 174 cm
Who are we without one another? Faces of Isolation emerged during the first months of the COVID-19 pandemic, when collective crisis became an intensely personal experience.
Isolated in Mexico City, Anastasia Shi began drawing one face each day—translating encounters, memories, and emotions into black ink on white paper. Over four months, these individual portraits accumulated into a dense chorus of sorrow, fear, tenderness, and hope. Created with markers and pens, the work moves between abstraction and figuration, using line, texture, and negative space to explore our need for human connection.
What began as a private ritual became a collective portrait: many separate lives joined within one shared field. Each hidden face offers a moment of recognition, reflecting how isolation reshaped our relationships with ourselves and one another.
Inner child, 2023
Acrylic on fabric
400 × 400 cm
Inner Child is a series of two acrylic paintings on fabric, created during a four-week artist residency in Río Blanco, Veracruz, inside a former textile factory deeply embedded in the region’s industrial history.
Surrounded by the traces and imagined ghosts of generations of textile workers, Anastasia turned toward something seemingly opposite: the freedom, curiosity, and joy of childhood. Painted directly on fabric, the works create a subtle connection to the history of the site while exploring the inner child as a part of ourselves that continues to seek play, wonder, and emotional attention.
The series reflects on the importance of reconnecting with this often-forgotten part of ourselves. In an adult world shaped by responsibility, productivity, and routine, Inner Child is a reminder that playfulness is not something we are meant to outgrow, but something we need to keep alive.
The Things, 2025
Oil on canvas
50 cm
It’s crowded in here, 2025
Oil on canvas
80 × 70 cm
Not overwhelmed at all, 2022
Mixed media collage on board
171 × 122 cm
Beyond the irony of its title, Not Overwhelmed at All exists at the threshold between emotional saturation and the pleasure of feeling everything at once. The work does not attempt to contain excess; it embraces it. In a world that demands clarity, order, and control, this collage proposes emotional overflow as a form of radical presence.
Its layers, fragments, and visual tensions function as an internal map: overlapping thoughts, simultaneous stimuli, emotions that refuse to wait their turn. Collage, by its very nature, becomes both language and concept—a structure that does not impose hierarchy, but allows contradiction to coexist.
Rather than simply representing overwhelm, the work reframes it. There is a quiet celebration of emotional chaos and an acceptance of intensity as part of being fully alive. Feeling too much ceases to be a burden and becomes a source of pleasure, expansion, and truth.
Not Overwhelmed at All invites us to reconsider the boundary between collapse and euphoria, suggesting that sometimes balance is not found in feeling less, but in allowing ourselves to feel everything.
In a world saturated with noise — cultural, digital, internal — The Pursuit of the Loudest Truth dares to ask: what does it mean to truly hear oneself?
This powerful series calls for inward reckoning. Each piece is a quiet act of defiance, a refusal to betray the inner compass. The work pulses with the tension between intuition and interference, clarity and confusion, reminding us that truth is not always loud — but it demands to be heard.
The artist offers an invitation: to listen more deeply, to feel more honestly, to choose integrity when the cost is high. The visual language is bold yet intimate, carrying the energy of self-confrontation and liberation. Shapes, textures, and space are used to evoke the visceral experience of choosing oneself — again and again.
Pursuit of the loudest truth, 2025
Mixed media on paper
35 × 28 cm (each fragment)
We will live later, 2023
Graphite on paper
132 × 63 cm
We Will Live Later explores the deeply rooted habit of postponing life — waiting for tomorrow, next month, or next year to finally begin living.
Drawing from Anastasia Shi’s post-Soviet upbringing and personal experience, the work reflects on a cultural mentality shaped by endurance, where joy, desire, rest, and personal dreams were often deferred in favor of simply keeping up with life.
Through this contemporary artwork, Shi questions what is lost when the future becomes more important than the present. We Will Live Later is ultimately an invitation to break inherited patterns of waiting and return to the only moment in which life can actually be experienced: now.
Thank you Mr. DMT, 2022
Oil on canvas
120 × 90 cm
I am forgiving you and myself, 2024
Mixed media, oil and pastels
60 × 45 cm
Self-Paralysis, 2023
Graphite on paper
120 × 100 cm
The Adjustment, 2020
Mixed media on paper
70 × 67 cm
When they call you, you have to go, 2023
Oil on canvas
110 × 90 cm
Vagourney, 2023
Oil on board
50 × 50 cm
Rerooted, 2020
Mixed media on paper
47 × 36 cm (each fragment)
Rerooted explores the inescapable pull of origin — not as memory, but as instinct. This work pulses with rawness, a quiet reminder that wildness, once rooted in us, never lets go.
The piece doesn’t seek resolution. Instead, it embraces the contradiction of remembering something essential — that identity is not found, but uncovered. Through layered gestures and earthy tones, the series speaks of something untamed: not belonging to a place, but being shaped by it.
Rearview, 2026
Mixed media on paper
15 × 10 cm (each fragment)
Rearview is a series of nine mixed-media works on paper combining pencil, oil pastel, and collage. Taking the automobile’s rearview mirror as its point of departure, the series uses the act of looking back as a metaphor for self-observation and self-awareness.
The works explore the distance between the image we construct of ourselves and the patterns that guide our behavior. Just as a rearview mirror offers only a partial view of the road, leaving blind spots beyond our field of vision, we often move through life without fully recognizing the habits, emotions, and narratives that shape our decisions.
Colección Río VI, 2024
Oil on canvas
100 × 80 cm
Colección Río is a poetic homage to the river as both metaphor and guide. Created in Brazil, the series channels the spirit of water - flexible, unbound, and free. In its currents, the artist finds a mirror of the self: the courage to release control, the beauty of surrender, and the taste of true liberation. Each work becomes a meditation on flow, gratitude, and transcendence - an invitation to move as the river does, toward higher states of being.
