Ye Cheng

Lives and works in NYC, NY, USA

Artist statement

I am a multi-disciplinary artist working in painting, installations, and digital collages to address the experience of cultural displacement and the conception of home. I draw on sensations of distance and detachment to conjure new worlds in a series of paintings and in a video and artist book titled Memory Map (2022). The works combine mediated representations of existing places with cultural motifs and architectural forms, resulting in renderings of hybrid spaces that exist in the zone between reality and invention, present and past, physical and digital. Bright bold color on deep black background. I built surreal architectural paintings that show abstracted and distorted places from memory - a garden, an apartment flat- and from my imagination and invite the viewer to get lost in their maze-like quality. By creating impossible, Escher-like spaces, I seek to explore my relationship with lost memories and forgotten specifics. For me, home represents a place of safety, familiarity, comfort, and longing, yet I also question whether these feelings are attached to a real location or a space that exists only in my memory and imagination. I play out the tension of longing for home and the destabilization through the recurring motif of the Google Map character. Having grown up in the historical city of Henan and Shanghai, but unable to visit those places, I often return via Google Maps street-view. In doing so, I am able to revisit familiar and missed places, but still held...

Artwork