Artist Statement
Chang Cheng is an artist who works with acrylic painting. She is interested in creating strange creatures in the natural world. Cheng's creative vision is based on the relationship between human development and the natural environment based on the concept of the “Anthropocene” and “Anthropocentrism”.
The mastery and domination status of nature has become increasingly rooted in human conceptions of the ecosystem. In Cheng’s concept, with the involvement of human activities in natural world, the new kind of unknown societies will develop in the future as a result of all changes. Cheng Found out that the form of plants has much in common with the human body, and when she spends time gazing at plants, she is always attracted by their lush vitality and strong root systems. Therefore, she fused the organs of the human body with plants in an exaggerated way, destroying the self-established dominance of human civilization and creating an entirely new world. Her works create a new plant system in a sci-fi manner, showing how the world is changing at a time when there are new future plants growing in nature secretly. All these imaginations and works leads to her whole cocept of works, which she called “Plants rebellion”.
“ Plants rebellion” is not a violent war but an awareness of ontology and an aesthetic transgression. It originates from Cheng’s aesthetic vision of the future: plants no longer passive beings confined within human-defined categories, but active participants who evolve through an unfamiliar coexistence with humans, rooted in primal environments through their growth. They begin to migrate, charting new maps with their roots and stems; they mutate, their forms challenging all established classifications; they demand to be seen—not as the other, but as co-shapers of this world.
Cheng returns to the ancient theory of animism. Not as a returns to primitive religion, but as a critical “multi-species ontology” that acknowledges plants possess their own world, perspective, and modes of communication. This philosophical lens corresponds with posthumanism’s aim to break down the theory of “human as the sole center“. Together, they rename plant “subjectivity,” providing a solid theoretical foundation for my artistic imagination. Cheng wants to discuss how pantheistic philosophy lays the theoretical groundwork for the revival of plant agency in the post-human era. She also analyzes how the aesthetics of mutation and symbiosis presented in the “plant rebellion” differ from traditional natural ecological aesthetics.
These reflections essentially form the core motivation for Chang Cheng’s upcoming researches and creations. draw directly upon the theoretical framework established here to support her artistic practice. Cheng’s work will continue to focus on painting and ceramics as mediums, which offer unique and complementary possibilities for presenting this complex subject matter.In painting, Cheng constructs grand future scenarios, employing color to render that strange and powerful botanical sensibility, thereby performing this silent yet intense drama on a two-dimensional level. Ceramics, as a medium, inherently possesses a “post-human” quality. It is the product of raw clay transformed through human firing, a process that is full of uncontrollable mutations and surprises which precisely mimic the state of symbiosis between plants and humans that Cheng explored. The physicality of ceramics, where hardness and fragility coexist, will become the optimal vessel for her exploration of “symbiotic subjectivity.”
The mastery and domination status of nature has become increasingly rooted in human conceptions of the ecosystem. In Cheng’s concept, with the involvement of human activities in natural world, the new kind of unknown societies will develop in the future as a result of all changes. Cheng Found out that the form of plants has much in common with the human body, and when she spends time gazing at plants, she is always attracted by their lush vitality and strong root systems. Therefore, she fused the organs of the human body with plants in an exaggerated way, destroying the self-established dominance of human civilization and creating an entirely new world. Her works create a new plant system in a sci-fi manner, showing how the world is changing at a time when there are new future plants growing in nature secretly. All these imaginations and works leads to her whole cocept of works, which she called “Plants rebellion”.
“ Plants rebellion” is not a violent war but an awareness of ontology and an aesthetic transgression. It originates from Cheng’s aesthetic vision of the future: plants no longer passive beings confined within human-defined categories, but active participants who evolve through an unfamiliar coexistence with humans, rooted in primal environments through their growth. They begin to migrate, charting new maps with their roots and stems; they mutate, their forms challenging all established classifications; they demand to be seen—not as the other, but as co-shapers of this world.
Cheng returns to the ancient theory of animism. Not as a returns to primitive religion, but as a critical “multi-species ontology” that acknowledges plants possess their own world, perspective, and modes of communication. This philosophical lens corresponds with posthumanism’s aim to break down the theory of “human as the sole center“. Together, they rename plant “subjectivity,” providing a solid theoretical foundation for my artistic imagination. Cheng wants to discuss how pantheistic philosophy lays the theoretical groundwork for the revival of plant agency in the post-human era. She also analyzes how the aesthetics of mutation and symbiosis presented in the “plant rebellion” differ from traditional natural ecological aesthetics.
These reflections essentially form the core motivation for Chang Cheng’s upcoming researches and creations. draw directly upon the theoretical framework established here to support her artistic practice. Cheng’s work will continue to focus on painting and ceramics as mediums, which offer unique and complementary possibilities for presenting this complex subject matter.In painting, Cheng constructs grand future scenarios, employing color to render that strange and powerful botanical sensibility, thereby performing this silent yet intense drama on a two-dimensional level. Ceramics, as a medium, inherently possesses a “post-human” quality. It is the product of raw clay transformed through human firing, a process that is full of uncontrollable mutations and surprises which precisely mimic the state of symbiosis between plants and humans that Cheng explored. The physicality of ceramics, where hardness and fragility coexist, will become the optimal vessel for her exploration of “symbiotic subjectivity.”