Ningshu Fang was born in Shanghai in 1979, the first year of China's One Child Policy, and raised by a grandmother who planted in her a deep love of art and of Chinese artistic tradition. That inheritance, calligraphy, ink painting, and the layered symbolism of Chinese visual culture, runs through everything she makes. Working under the name Shanghai Dragonfly, she carries the weight of cultural memory without losing a sense of play or personal warmth.
A love letter to Chinese history and her own past.
She moved to Portland in 2016 and, with her husband Dan, built the Asia America Company and its gallery at Riverplace, which remains her primary space for showing work. She has been a featured artist at Lan Su Chinese Garden in Portland, where she has also given artist talks, and has exhibited in New York City galleries. Her pieces move fluidly between traditional Chinese technique and contemporary interpretation, bridging Eastern artistic traditions and Western contexts, and the brushwork rewards standing close.
At Hopscotch Portland, Fang held the featured gallery from April 29 through September 28, 2026, a five-month run. There was nothing there to press or jump on. It was the rare Hopscotch exhibit that asked only that you slow down and look, which is what ink and line work have always asked for. It was also a local artist showing in her adopted home city, ten years after she arrived.
If there is a single thread in the work, it is the grandmother who raised her and gave her art during a very particular moment in China's history. Every piece since is, in some way, a reply to her.
