Helen Ye Plehn’s artistic journey is anything but conventional—it is deeply intertwined with her personal path of healing and spiritual awakening.
From a young age, Helen was drawn to arts and crafts. Growing up in China, however, she was discouraged from pursuing art as a career due to the starving artist stigma. A single childhood art competition she didn’t win convinced her she lacked talent. The irony? Her late father was a traditional Chinese painter, calligrapher, and second-generation Feng Shui master. Her fondest memories are of following him into the mountains, painting under the trees, sipping tea in orchid gardens, and quietly sketching while he taught his students.
As the years passed, Helen set aside her artistic dreams in favor of academic achievement, striving to meet her family’s and society’s expectations. She became an exceptional student, earned a full fellowship, and moved to the U.S. to pursue a Ph.D. in Tourism and Hospitality Management, specializing in human sensory experience design. By all external measures, she had a bright future—a promising academic career, an upcoming wedding, and a clear path to success.
Yet internally, Helen was struggling. In 2011, a visit to the ER due to severe anxiety and depression became a turning point. It cracked open the door to a deeper journey—one of healing, awakening, and self-discovery.
Helen left her Ph.D. program and began exploring meditation, yoga, and spirituality. Her journey led her through the study of astrology (both Western and Vedic), Ayurveda, Human Design, the Enneagram, Numerology, the Gene Keys, and of course, Feng Shui. She became a certified yoga and meditation teacher, Vedic astrologer, crystal healer, and Ayurveda practitioner. She also discovered Flamenco dance—an art form that awakened something fierce, passionate, and liberating within her. Through its rhythms and expressions, she found a visceral connection to her inner fire and soul truth. As she healed and grew, the call to create art returned—stronger than ever.
Professionally, Helen returned to school and earned a second master’s degree in Interior Architecture and Design, becoming a licensed interior designer in California. She also reconnected with her father’s spiritual and artistic legacy, becoming a third-generation Feng Shui master and intuitive painter.
In 2013, Helen founded See Beauty Design LLC, offering Feng Shui-based interior design and custom surface pattern design services that harmonized the energy of spaces with her clients’ birth elements and Kua numbers. In 2018, her business evolved into Helen Creates Beauty LLC, encompassing her intuitive painting, crystal grid art, holistic healing, and spiritual teaching.
In 2019, after seven years of daily meditation, Helen experienced a spontaneous Kundalini awakening. Her psychic abilities heightened, enabling her to see auras and energy fields and connect with the spirit realm. By 2022, through deep meditative channeling sessions, she birthed the Aura Color Wheel: a dynamic system to identify your soul’s purpose through your Soul Aura Color.
Inspired by spiritual visions, ancient Egyptian symbolism, and the concept of soul evolution, combining her experiences working with color and energy, this system identifies 36 Soul Aura Colors and 9 Universal Soul Gift Archetypes, each representing unique combinations of soul gifts, wounds, and lessons. Her upcoming book, The Aura Color Wheel: What Your Soul’s Aura Reveals About Your Inner Gifts, Wounds, and Lessons by is being published by Hay House Publishing.
“Our personal Soul Aura Color reflects who we are at a soul level,” Helen explains. “When we heal our wounds and embrace our lessons, our inner light grows stronger, guiding us toward fulfillment.”
Helen now fully embodies her Artist Soul Gift Archetype, channeling beauty, joy, and divine wisdom through her work. Helen is a creative conduit. She believes artists are the channelers of the divine and that we are one and connected. Just as Leonardo da Vinci once said, “Where the spirit does not work with the hand, there is no art.”
As a clairvoyant artist, she paints through her third eye vision. Colors are frequencies, symbols are portals, and her brushstrokes carry energy. Her signature crystal grid paintings combine color, crystals, and sacred geometry to help her clients manifest their intentions and infuse their homes with high-vibrational Feng Shui energy. Among the most collected pieces globally in her online art gallery is the Soul Flower & Aura Color Portrait. Clients first take the Soul Aura Color quiz on her website to discover their current Soul Aura Colors. They then receive a guided meditation to connect with their soul flowers or can select their own, which will serve as the stunning backdrop for their personalized portrait.
Helen’s work is a vibrant celebration of joy, beauty, and soul expression. Her pieces radiate saturated colors, joyful imagery, and expressive, energetic strokes—each one a living transmission. Her art is not confined by mediums as she explores them all: oil, acrylic, ink, watercolor, gouache, pastel, color pencils. It is about the visions and energies she wants to convey.
Upcoming Solo Exhibition: The Aura Garden
Helen’s solo exhibition, The Aura Garden, opens this spring at The Peacock Art Gallery, located in the historic Old World Village in Huntington Beach (7561 Center Avenue, Unit 28). The gallery owner invited Helen after a chance encounter during a meditation class Helen taught at the Huntington Beach Art Center. That class helped the owner through the grief of losing her sister—an art teacher in Iran—and inspired her to reopen a gallery as a tribute to new beginnings and remembrance.
Helen’s vibrant, joyful art felt like the perfect expression of that spirit. Now, she has been invited as the gallery’s first solo artist. “The Aura Garden” is more than an art show—it’s a visual spell, a seven-year soul journey woven through crystal grids, soul flowers and aura portraits, and expressive florals. A living archive of beauty, joy, and high vibrational energies.
“Art is the soul’s mirror,” Helen reflects. “To create is to know oneself; to resonate is to recognize the harmony of souls.” If you are seeking artwork that speaks to your spirit, awakens your energy, and tells a story of healing, joy, and soulful purpose—Helen Ye Plehn is your artist.
