Cheng Yen Yu

Lives and works in London, UK

Artist statement

Archaeology of the Psyche My practice begins with a condition of being lost—not simply as a loss of direction, but as a state in which existing structures no longer provide a stable sense of position. I think through this condition as “permanent liminality”: a prolonged threshold in which identities, environments, and futures remain in transformation without arriving at a final state. Rather than treating this instability as something to resolve, I ask what forms of order might emerge from transformation itself. I am drawn to the recursive structures of ferns, branches, mycelial networks, rivers, and geological formations. Across different scales, these forms develop through repetition, variation, branching, accumulation, and decay. Their organization does not depend on a predetermined endpoint; it emerges through processes of becoming. Fractal structures offer me a way to think about incompletion not as suspension, but as an active condition capable of generating form. My paintings incorporate plants, plaster, mother-of-pearl, fibers, metal oxides, and construction materials. Through layering, erosion, oxidation, cracking, and redeposition, I build surfaces that move between painting, relief, skin, and geological strata. I intervene in these processes while allowing material contingencies to redirect them: forms settle, branch, fracture, accumulate, or disappear. Rather than illustrating fractal theory, the materials enact an unstable order through their own...

Artwork