Kuiyi Shen is an art historian whose teaching and writing has focus on Chinese and Japanese art with an emphasis on modern and contemporary Chinese art and Sino-Japanese art exchanges in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. He received a BA in fine arts from the Shanghai Normal University and an MA and PhD in art history from the Ohio State University.

Prior to his 1989 relocation to the United States, Kuiyi Shen served as the director of the art book department at the Shanghai People’s Fine Arts Publishing House. Shen taught at Ohio University, State University of New York at Buffalo, Rice University, and University of Oregon before joining the UCSD faculty. He is the author and co-author of many books and exhibition catalogues on modern and contemporary Chinese art, including A Century in Crisis: Tradition and Modernity in the Art of Twentieth Century China (1998); Between the Thunder and the Rain: Chinese Paintings from the Opium War to the Cultural Revolution (2000); Word and Meaning: Six Contemporary Chinese Artists (2000); Chongqing Chilis (2003); Zhou Brothers—Thirty Years of Collaboration (2004); and the forthcoming Arts of Modern China, Social Networks in Republican Shanghai, Literature in Line, and The Challenge of Modernity: Chinese Painting of the Late Nineteenth and Early Twentieth Centuries.
Shen's essays have been published in Popular China (Rowman & Littlefield, 2002), Illustrating Asia: Comic and Picture Books, Humor and Fan Magazines (University of Hawaii Press, 2001), Studies on Shanghai School Painting (Shanghai 2001), A Prospect to the Twenty-First Century Visual Arts (Taipei, 1999), Chinese Painting and the Twentieth Century: Creativity in the Aftermath of Tradition (Hangzhou 1997), as well as journals including Modern Chinese Literature and Culture, Inks: Cartoon and Comic Art Studies, Art China (China), Yishu (Canada), Tsing Hua Journal of Chinese Studies (Taiwan),Studies on Chinese History (Korea).

Shen has worked as a curator and curatorial consultant for projects including Literature in Line (Ohio State University, 1997), A Century in Crisis, the modern portion of China, 5000 Years (Guggenheim Museum SoHo and Guggenheim Museum Bilbao, 1998), Word and Meaning (SUNY Buffalo and Ohio University, 2000-2001), Chongqing Chilis (Ohio University, Wellesley College, Ohio State University, and Miami University, 2003-2004), and Landscapes (Shanghai Gallery of Art, 2004).

Shen teaches a broad range of courses and topics from surveys on the arts of China, twentieth-century Chinese art, the arts of Japan, East Asian art, to thematic lectures and seminars on Chinese landscape painting of Song and Yuan, Chinese literati and court painting, tradition and modernity in twentieth-century China, contemporary Chinese art, Japanese Buddhist art and architecture, Japanese painting and Ukiyo-e prints, and the arts of modern Japan.