PARIS.- The constellation of subjects and scenes captured in Xinyi Cheng’s evocative paintings are drawn from her encounters. From a tiny dog called Monroe staring at a bone on a red carpet to a man in leopard-print boxer shorts on a sofa speaking on the phone, her works unravel complex emotions, desires, and dynamics that permeate contemporary life. Cheng’s expressive use of light and colour help conjure feelings, reveries, and impulses that reside within our everyday experiences of being in the world. In an often enigmatic atmosphere of dreams and solitude, the characters depicted by the artist sound like unexpected tributes to the moderns such as Picasso, Toulouse-Lautrec, Degas or Caillebotte.
For Cheng’s first major institutional exhibition in France, the presentation brings together over thirty existing works from 2016 to 2021 spread across the whole building.
Shown in unfamiliar groupings, they open up novel correlations and understandings within her oeuvre.
The exhibition starts with a sequence of interior and nocturnal situations, continuing upstairs to include works that progressively explore our metaphysical relationship to the world through animals and natural forces. On the top floor, Cheng’s latest tableaux of characters—humans and dogs outdoors — appear against the backdrop of the vast windows looking out over the skyline.
Beyond a false softness, these new works represent her reflection not only on what it means for us to co-exist with one another, but on what it means to be human. Through her coruscating colour treatments on canvas, Cheng offers her insights to a baffling world, revealing enigmatic images.
Curator: Christina Li
Xinyi Cheng, born in 1989 in Wuhan, China. She lives and works currently in Paris.
Cheng studied at the Academy of Arts & Design at Tsinghua University, Maryland Institute College of Art. From 2016 to 2017, she participated in the Rijksakademie Residency in the Netherlands, and in 2019 she was the recipient of Art Basel’s Baloise Art Prize. She was the subject of a major solo exhibition at Hamburger Bahnhof, Berlin (2020) and she has also participated in recent group exhibitions at the Renaissance Society, Chicago (2021); 13th Shanghai Biennale at Power Station of Art, Shanghai (2021); Bourse de Commerce, Paris (2021); Palais de Tokyo, Paris (2020); Frans Hals Museum, Haarlem, Netherlands (2018), among others.
Christina Li is a curator and writer working between Hong Kong and Amsterdam.
She was the Curator-at-Large at Spring Workshop, Hong Kong, where she served as the Director between 2015 and 2017. She was named curator of Pilvi Takala’s solo presentation at the Pavilion of Finland at the 59th Venice Biennale (2022).
