Beasts and Sovereignty, 2025, Church organ utensil, acrylic, film sheet, mixed media on inkjet print paper, framed with vinyl envelope
Cheng presents a body of work titled "Beasts and Sovereignty," which further investigates appropriation and the semiotics of advertising. Drawing from an expansive and heterogeneous array of materials—including everyday refuse, residual markings, abrasions, propaganda slogans, anime, popular culture, and conspiracy discourses—she carefully organizes these elements within poster-sized trading card binders. This unconventional format critically examines systems of manipulation and dissemination. Through physical film masking techniques, Cheng explores the liminal space between reality and artificiality, interrogating the credibility of visual and ideological constructs. Each trading card, poster, or masked image becomes a vessel, encapsulating layered and open-ended significations. Cheng’s practice resonates with The Carrier Bag Theory, a concept articulated by Ursula K. Le Guin as a counter-narrative to the traditional hero’s tale. Le Guin proposed the "carrier bag" as humanity’s first cultural artifact—a tool for gathering and holding, rather than for conquest. Similarly, Cheng’s works act as vessels that gather, hold, and reveal the multiplicity of stories shaping our collective existence. Through this lens, she redefines what it means to carry and create, celebrating the overlooked and mundane as powerful agents of meaning.
Cheng presents a body of work titled "Beasts and Sovereignty," which further investigates appropriation and the semiotics of advertising. Drawing from an expansive and heterogeneous array of materials—including everyday refuse, residual markings, abrasions, propaganda slogans, anime, popular culture, and conspiracy discourses—she carefully organizes these elements within poster-sized trading card binders. This unconventional format critically examines systems of manipulation and dissemination. Through physical film masking techniques, Cheng explores the liminal space between reality and artificiality, interrogating the credibility of visual and ideological constructs. Each trading card, poster, or masked image becomes a vessel, encapsulating layered and open-ended significations. Cheng’s practice resonates with The Carrier Bag Theory, a concept articulated by Ursula K. Le Guin as a counter-narrative to the traditional hero’s tale. Le Guin proposed the "carrier bag" as humanity’s first cultural artifact—a tool for gathering and holding, rather than for conquest. Similarly, Cheng’s works act as vessels that gather, hold, and reveal the multiplicity of stories shaping our collective existence. Through this lens, she redefines what it means to carry and create, celebrating the overlooked and mundane as powerful agents of meaning.
Combines, 2025, Acrylic, acrylic medium, white latex, crayons, oil pastels on photographic paper; mixed media on inkjet prints; mixed media on wood
Cheng’s series centers on recurring motifs such as keys, bubbles, braids, and heart-shaped wood grain, embedded into industrial wood panels and constructed with an idiosyncratic logic that blends everyday objects with industrial materials, advertisements, and news photographs. Mimicking the screen dimensions of mobile phones, each piece undergoes a meticulous process of digital production, scanning, hand-painting, and enlargement, creating a dynamic interplay between digital and analog techniques. This layered approach reflects Cheng’s broader practice of collecting, reconfiguring, and recontextualizing seemingly disparate elements to form works that act as visual diaries, merging personal symbolism with sociopolitical commentary. By foregrounding the inherent instability of meaning within mediated experiences, Cheng challenges fixed cultural categories and dominant narratives, using this instability as a deliberate strategy to interrogate the intersections of technology, identity, and the systems that shape visual culture. His works resist closure, instead offering a constantly evolving exploration of the layered meanings produced by the interaction of diverse images, media, and technologies.
Cheng’s series centers on recurring motifs such as keys, bubbles, braids, and heart-shaped wood grain, embedded into industrial wood panels and constructed with an idiosyncratic logic that blends everyday objects with industrial materials, advertisements, and news photographs. Mimicking the screen dimensions of mobile phones, each piece undergoes a meticulous process of digital production, scanning, hand-painting, and enlargement, creating a dynamic interplay between digital and analog techniques. This layered approach reflects Cheng’s broader practice of collecting, reconfiguring, and recontextualizing seemingly disparate elements to form works that act as visual diaries, merging personal symbolism with sociopolitical commentary. By foregrounding the inherent instability of meaning within mediated experiences, Cheng challenges fixed cultural categories and dominant narratives, using this instability as a deliberate strategy to interrogate the intersections of technology, identity, and the systems that shape visual culture. His works resist closure, instead offering a constantly evolving exploration of the layered meanings produced by the interaction of diverse images, media, and technologies.
This video work examines the intersections of capitalism, dystopia, science fiction, and technological animism through field research and video production conducted at three key sites: the California Academy of Sciences in San Francisco, the Westinghouse Atom Smasher in Pittsburgh, and the Los Angeles Museum of the Moving Image. Drawing on the visual and conceptual implications of the spherical form that connects these locations, the work explores how futuristic conceptions embedded in such architectural and symbolic motifs reinterpret traditional animist beliefs within contemporary technological and cultural contexts. By emphasizing the visual parallels between these spheres—ranging from the California Academy's domed rooftop to the spherical architecture of the Atom Smasher and the Moving Image Museum—the project evokes the whimsical landscapes of the Teletubbies. It interrogates how these futuristic forms, while seemingly antithetical to animist traditions, paradoxically perpetuate and transform such beliefs within popular culture and mass media.
Incorporating examples such as Pokémon, which integrates Shinto-inspired animist concepts into global capitalist frameworks, the video employs a hybrid methodology of documentary, collage, and graphic animation to investigate the cultural and ideological significance of these phenomena. Through this lens, the work critiques the ideological dominance of capitalism, technology, and media while reimagining their role in reshaping human connections to spirituality and the natural world.
All the photo take by Bryan Conley
Incorporating examples such as Pokémon, which integrates Shinto-inspired animist concepts into global capitalist frameworks, the video employs a hybrid methodology of documentary, collage, and graphic animation to investigate the cultural and ideological significance of these phenomena. Through this lens, the work critiques the ideological dominance of capitalism, technology, and media while reimagining their role in reshaping human connections to spirituality and the natural world.
All the photo take by Bryan Conley
