CV

Born 1991 in Taiwan and raised in Penang, Malaysia, Cindy Cheng I-Hsin makes text, performance, sculpture and installation inspired by the concept and technique of printmaking. Her works investigate her shifting surroundings, scrutinising physical and metaphorical print marks of everyday activity. Her practice concerning reflections on identity and cultural imprints pictures an alternative way of understanding humanity in which she sees human-being as print-making.

Her work has won prizes at the 2023 Young Artist Award (Taiwan), the 2022 and 2020 Contemporary Sculpture Lihpao Prize (Taiwan), featured in the 2020 Taiwan Biennial collateral events, the 2019 Transcultural Collaboration (Switzerland) as well as exhibited in South Korea, Hong Kong and Malaysia. She studied Western Languages and Literatures and the Art and Design programme at the National Taiwan University (2015) before obtaining an MFA in visual arts at the Taipei National University of the Arts (2023).

Since 2020, Cheng has delved into aspects of Eastern traditions, such as the philosophy and science of the pictographic Han characters, Traditional Chinese Medicine, I-Ching and Daoism. With the mutual support of theory and practice, her research finds ground in the concept of ‘shentigan’, a term coined by Taiwanese scholar Yu, Shuenn-Der in his 2016 publication The Shentigan Turn. Shentigan, a cultural-specific reference to the all-attentive perception, emphasises how its general translation to English as ‘bodily sensation’ excludes what is beyond the five senses, such as the concept of qi, yinyang, and more. 

This new research angle not only allows Cheng to develop her recent works focusing on the linguistic, physical and metaphorical significations of written characters but also further proposes an alternative understanding of creative intuition, suggested by shentigan to be simultaneously actively/passively exercised, both by the subject/object, the creator/creation. To the artist, her conceptual and visual art practice (of printmaking-inspired performative and still works) serves the purpose of reflecting contemporary times as well as further contemplating what it means to be alive and human today.