Terraterra 2021 / Xinyi Cheng

The subjects of Cheng’s evocative paintings are drawn from her daily encounters. Her works unravel complex emotions, desires, and dynamics that permeate contemporary life.
For Terraterra - her first foray into ceramics - the artist hand-painted a limited series of 100 unique dinner plates (26 cm diameter), conceiving them as pages of her personal sketchbook.
Working for the first time with ceramic painting - a completely different process from painting on canvas, therefore also free from some of its constraints - allowed Cheng to paint in an experimental and more spontaneous way. Her plates portray both recurring themes and subjects from her pictorial research and images, people and situations related to her time in Apulia.

Born 1989 in Wuhan, China, she lives and works in Paris. Cheng studied at the Academy of Arts & Design at Tsinghua University, Beijing, and the Maryland Institute College of Art, Baltimore. From 2016 to 2017, she participated in the Rijksakademie Residency in Amsterdam, the Netherlands. In 2019, she was awarded with the prestigious Baloise Art Prize.

Her work has been recently featured at Bourse de Commerce - Pinault Collection, Paris (2021); 13th Shanghai Biennale, Power Station of Art, Shanghai (2021); Hamburger Bahnhof—Museum für Gegenwart, Berlin, (2020); Palais de Tokyo, Paris (2020); Gladstone Gallery, New York (2020); Karpidas collection, Dallas (2020); CAC Brétigny, France (2019); Bétonsalon, Paris (2019).
Xinyi Cheng’s work is represented by Antenna Space, Shanghai and Balice Hertling, Paris.