Tingting Cheng
First-Year MFA Candidate
Tingting Cheng activates cultural archives in different ways, using sound and sculpture as contemporary witchcraft to connect the audience and create a sense of ritual. She also brings this immersive landscape into other communities as a social practice. Her multi-dimensional works often mix natural, artificial, and folk materials. By breaking the official narrative of commodity fetishism, she learns how to imagine civilized relics from oriental modeling in a contemporary archaeological way. By collaging to create sculptural images and explore the ideology behind them, the cultural differences and fusions, the “Anthropocene fossils” with eerie images would emerge on the horizon of the new era.
She lived and studied in socialist countries, where the region’s unique understanding of religion and witchcraft shaped her research on animism or rituals. For the past five years, she has been working as a nomadic artist in fields of different places and participating in communities to understand how the forms of cultural objects flow and evolve. With the politics of international trade in the 21st century, for which a large number of trade history and overseas sinology books are available everywhere on the online shopping platform, she uses art as a potential space combining the poetic and political, generating new meanings to resist the control of official culture.
