Ye Cheng
What’s your name and where are you from/based?
Ye Cheng, im based in NYC.
Can you describe your practice in a few words?
I create imagined homelands.
When did you first begin painting?
I was never a talkative kid, I’m more like an observer. At age of 13, I started learning oil painting techniques and art history with artist and professor, Yinchen Zhou. I was her only student in her studio. Watching her create is inspiring and enchanting; the quiet studio feels like a safe zone to me, and that’s where art becomes my language of expression.
When did the landscapes of your imagination start merging with the landscapes around you?
Having lived in the U.S. for 15 years, I often reflect on what “home” means to me. I began exploring Google Maps Street View as a kind of digital nomad, revisiting familiar places I could no longer access physically. This feeling of distance and detachment inspires me to build a world, an imagined homeland. Over time, this personal exploration grew into a broader inquiry that bridges the personal and the historical, the East and the West, the old and the new.
Your recent works began with sketches made on the New York subway. What draws you to make art in such a transient space?
It wasn’t intentional or performative. Its rather a therapeutic exercise to create a psychological portal. In those impersonal “non-spaces,” I construct space as a dynamic fusion of the real and the imagined, the subjective and the objective. It’s an inner world shaped not only by personal emotion, but also by the cultural, social, and spatial forces that surround me. In that in-between space, I find grounding, possibility, and a place to simply exist.
Your title references the Daoist text Zhuangzi’s Happy Excursion. What part of this philosophy resonates with you?
“Xiaoyao You” is not merely a journey through space, but a state of the spirit breaking free from constraint — entering freedom and boundlessness. Similarly, in a contemporary Western context, Gaston Bachelard’s notion of “Le Redousse” (the redoubt) from The Poetics of Space offers a contrasting perspective: a shelter of retreat born from “angoisse” — the anxiety and desire to conquer the world. In my work, I create a world of peace as a way to resist this impulse to dominate.
You draw on Song dynasty landscapes while living in New York. What inspired you to bridge the ancestral and the urban?
I need 15 pages to explain this question. Or none;)
Living between cultures can create what you call “disjunction.” Does that appear in your composition?
I want the composition to symbolize experience of moving through, rather than arrival.
Your landscapes include cubes and measured divisions, and they seem to appear more frequently in your recent works. What does this sense of geometric order mean to you?
They serve as motifs of modernity. These architectural cubes—rooted in the language of minimalist apartment and urban design—represent current living environment. By rendering them in glass or mirror, I seek to distort space, transforming these forms into pathways that reflect both movement and perception.
How do you see the dark shapes in your work? Are these some sort of disruption, or something else?
It present the “Angoisse” (anguish). Void.
As your landscapes keep shifting, what kind of spaces do you imagine painting next?
I’m stepping through the portal once again. As I move deeper into the black void, a soft glow begins to pull me forward. In this new terrain, familiar objects start to drift into view—my grandpa’s grapevine, a ticking clock, a plastic spoon, a piece of dusted lace. They float like quiet witnesses from different times and spaces. I recognize them as fragments of memory, resurfacing to shape the next landscapes I will paint.
Where can people find you?
My studio is based in Midtown Manhattan, and my work is currently on view at Latitude Gallery through December 13, 2025. I’m spending this season in Shanghai for a residency at the Swatch Art Peace Hotel, where I’m preparing for two solo exhibitions in China next year. For more updates, follow me on Instagram at @ye_cheng_art. I’ll be back in New York next spring.
