BIOGRAPHY

May Sun is a Boston-based visual artist and recipient of the 2025 Massachusetts Cultural Council Creative Individual Award. A Signature Member of the National Association of Women Artists (NAWA), her work has been presented in solo and juried exhibitions nationally and internationally, including Gallery Kayafas in Boston, the National Arts Club in New York, and artist residencies at Château d'Orquevaux in France and the Manship Artists Residency in Massachusetts. Following an invitation from the director of the MIT Museum Studio, one of her works was retained by the studio for educational programming.

Before dedicating herself fully to her visual art practice, May earned a Ph.D. in Chemical Engineering and completed postdoctoral research at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT). Her transition from scientific research to fine art reflects a lifelong curiosity about understanding the world through distinct ways of seeing. While her scientific background shapes her habits of observation, inquiry, and experimentation, painting serves as her primary language for conceptual exploration.

Working primarily in acrylic and mixed media, May has developed an interdisciplinary practice enriched by science, travel, dance, and cross-cultural experience. She approaches each project as an evolving dialogue between material, form, and idea, allowing her visual language to continuously adapt and expand.

May maintains her studio in Boston's SoWa Art + Design District, where she creates new work and prepares for national and international exhibitions.

ARTIST STATEMENT

My work explores the visual forms and underlying structures found in the natural world and human culture. I begin with careful observation, distilling forms from sources as diverse as DNA, the human body, landscapes, architecture, music, dance, and beyond. Through an evolving personal visual language and iconography, I reimagine these elements and weave them into imagined pictorial worlds. By bringing them into the shared space, I remain open to unexpected discoveries as each painting—and each series —unfolds its own direction.

Painting is both a way of seeing and a way of being. It is an act of curiosity, on going exploration - a process that allows me to create worlds that could exist only through painting.

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MOVEMENT PRACTICE

In addition to painting, I maintain an active practice in movement arts, studying classical Chinese dance and performing solo pieces on stage. Earlier in my time at MIT, I competed with the MIT Ballroom Dance Team. This engagement with dance informs my visual language, bringing a heightened awareness of rhythm, gesture, and embodied movement to my paintings.