2022 MFA Thesis Exhibition

Bright, bold colors on deep, black backgrounds. My surreal architectural paintings show abstracted and distorted places from memory—a garden, an apartment—and my imagination, inviting viewers to lose themselves in their maze-like quality. Through Escher-like spaces, I explore my relationship with lost memories and forgotten specifics. Home represents safety, comfort, and longing; yet I question whether these feelings are attached to a real location or an imaginary space. Reminiscing yet unable to visit my hometowns of Henan and Shanghai, I return via the Google Maps character. Serving as a recurring motif, this figure allows me to revisit familiar and missed places, but I am still held outside and removed.

I depict mountains as a vessel to capture my fraught relationship with beauty, particularly the beauty of Song dynasty landscape paintings—my love of and distance from them and, by extension, my Asian identity within a modern Western mode of thinking and art education. In my paintings, images of mountains are contained inside boxes, keeping them safe but separate. The formal qualities of these mountains recall Chinese ink paintings, creating spaces for hybridity and cultural exchange within each painting.

Ye Cheng is a multi-disciplinary artist working with painting, installations, and digital collages to address the experience of cultural displacement, mobility, and disjunction. Living between boundaries and communities as a first-generation immigrant in the US, Cheng centers her practice on concepts of home and hybridity.

Cheng graduated with a BFA degree in painting from Maryland Institute College of Art in 2016 and is an MFA candidate in Fine Arts at Parsons School of Design, graduating May 2022. Her works have been exhibited in the Pantocrator Gallery in Shanghai, China, 2015; Tree Art Gallery in Beijing, China, 2016; Palazzo Jules Maidoff in Florence, Italy, 2015; TAG gallery in Los Angeles, 2019; The Research House for the Asian Art (RHAA) in Chicago, 2021; Latitude Gallery in New York, NY, 2022.