Riyadh-based multidisciplinary artist SAN SHYN paints a series of character-driven analog works that hold vitality and stillness in the same frame, exploring fragility, playfulness and the impermanence of existence through acrylic, spray paint and stencil.
SAN SHYN has been developing characters as emotional vessels since childhood. Each figure in her work is built to carry something specific: a feeling, a state, a quality of being that resists being stated directly but can be given form. The process begins with exploring shapes that evolve into characters, moves through sketching and into painting, and remains open throughout. Some works are reworked or repainted until they feel resolved. The characters are the thinking.
The series presented here, made across 2025, is rooted in a preoccupation with both life and death, or more precisely the space between them. “I’m always trying to hold both sides,” she says, “how alive something feels and how quickly it can disappear.” That tension, vitality and stillness occupying the same surface, is what the work is working toward. The characters that embody it are expressive and symbolic, playful in form and quietly unsettling in what they carry, fragile in the way that anything genuinely felt tends to be.
The paintings are made with acrylic, spray paint and occasional stencil on canvas, a combination that gives the work a textural range from controlled mark to loose, atmospheric ground. The finished pieces will be released as a selection of prints and posters, extending the original works into editions.
SAN SHYN is a multidisciplinary artist based in Riyadh, Saudi Arabia, working across murals, illustration and brand collaborations. Her practice centres on bold character-driven compositions and symbolic forms, exploring transformation, fragility and the balance between playfulness and introspection.
Website: sanshyn.com Instagram: @sanshynin
The Language of Becoming, 2025. Acrylic, spray paint and stencil on canvas.
