Ye Cheng (b.1992, Henan) is a Chinese diaspora artist whose work explores themes of displacement, mobility, disjunction, and self-recognition, drawing on her experience of living between boundaries and communities. A first-generation immigrant of the United States, Cheng’s practice reflects her vision of globalisation, relating the artist’s challenges to the larger state of cultural migration and recalling the loss of Chinese heritage as creative expression.
Ye Cheng graduated with a MFA degree in Fine Art from the New School at Parsons, New York (2022), and a BFA degree in painting from Maryland Institute College of Art, Maryland (2016). Ye Cheng exhibited across the United States and Asia, including Latitude Gallery in New York; Chambers Fine Art in New York; Make Room in Los Angeles; and RHAA, Chicago; Soka Gallery in Beijing, China. Her work was selected and featured in e-flux Education and Artnet.
Ye Cheng currently lives and works in New York.
Shape of Memories | Trailer
Video | Memory Map
Artist Statement
Memory Map by Ye Cheng
Bright bold colors on deep black backgrounds, my surreal architectural paintings show abstracted and distorted places from memory – a garden, an apartment, and my imagination; inviting viewers to lose themselves in their maze-like quality.
In this series, titled Memory Map, I address the experience of cultural displacement, mobility, and disjunction. I draw on sensations of distance and detachment to conjure new worlds. Through Escher-like spaces, I explore my relationship with lost memories and forgotten specifics.
Home represents safety, comfort, and longing, yet I question whether these feelings are attached to a real location or an imaginary space. The works combine mediated representations of existing places with architectural forms and cultural motifs, recalling Song dynasty Chinese mountain paintings as disappearing heritage, a home, and a shelter.
The renderings of hybrid spaces exist in the zone between reality and invention, present and past, physical and digital.
CV
| 2022 | Master of Fine Art, The New School, Parsons, New York, U.S. |
| 2016 |
Bachelor of Fine Arts in Painting, Maryland Institute College of Art (MICA), Baltimore, Maryland, U.S.
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| 2015 | Studio Arts Center International, Florence, Italy |
| 2023 | Vista Flux, Latitude Gallery, New York, New York, U.S. |
| Night Siesta, Accent Sisters, Jersey City, New Jersey, U.S. |
| 2023 | Evening Shadow, Make Room, Los Angeles, California, U.S. |
| Genesis: A New Generation of Chinese Artists, Artfarm, Chambers Fine Art, New York, U.S. | |
| Paris, Texas, Soka Art, Beijing, China | |
| Cruel Spring, Latitude Gallery, New York, U.S. | |
| Trove, Deanna Evans Projects, New York, U.S. | |
| 2022 | An Asterism, the Parsons Fine Arts MFA thesis exhibition, Anna-Maria and Stephen Kellen Gallery, New York, U.S. |
| Conceive, Latitude Gallery, New York, U.S. | |
| 2021 | A City to Wear, The Research House for Asian Art, Chicago, Illinois, U.S. |
| Its time to reduce the backlog, The Latitude Gallery, Brooklyn, New York, U.S. | |
| 2019 | LA Open, TAG Gallery, Los Angeles, California, U.S. |
| 2018 | Conception Art, Iron Triangle, Los Angeles, California, U.S. |
| Star Project, Tree Art Museum, Beijing, China | |
| 2017 | LA Open, TAG Gallery, Los Angeles, California, U.S. |
| Expo Contemporary, The Reef, Los Angeles, California, U.S. | |
| Beverly Hills Art Show, Beverly Hills, California, U.S. | |
| 2016 | Star Project, Tree Art Gallery, Beijing, China |
| Star Project, Tree Art Gallery, University of Miami, Florida, U.S. | |
| 2015 | The Other Worlds, Pantocrator Gallery, Shanghai, China |
| MICA at SACI, Palazzo Jules Maidoff, Florence, Italy |
