Un Cheng

“Unbridled Wanders” traces the footsteps of the itinerant-wanderer artist traversing through the suburban corners of the city where nature and the man-made are closely intertwined. Based off photographs taken by the artist, Cheng paints a series of tableaus depicting the overlooked corners of quotidian life in Hong Kong. She accentuates the unappealing moments of the everyday that get omitted within the crevices, underlining their textures, material memories, humor, and awkwardness. The poetic visual journal lays bare the psychological landscape of an artist seeking solace and human connection amidst the ceaseless endeavors of a fast-paced metropolis.

Un Cheng’s psychological landscape melds her inner world with careful observations of her immediate surroundings. Erratic and devoid of human figures, her large-scale paintings embody an innate desire for human connection within an isolating metropolis.

Un Cheng’s exhibition What’s there when you ain’t home, encapsulating a visual journal of the restless wanderer-painter in Iceland and Sham Shui Po. No two landscapes can be more different than the sparse winter of a Nordic Island and the hectic urban subtropics of Kowloon. Yet, the artist ravishes in the amorphous abstraction of atmospheric light, thick textures of oil, vibrant blocks of colours, and strokes of falling snow and rising vapour. Resonantly, these psychological landscapes lay bare the desire of an itinerant artist-traveller to resist loneliness, forge human connections, and fall in love with an eclectic world that at times feels geographically isolated and emotionally indifferent.

In a recent diptych painting Nice to have a night like this (2021), Un Cheng uses her signature psychedelic color palette to paint night scenes of Sham Shui Po overlayed with other forgotten corners and fragments of her memory. From the doorways of old walk-ups, to the uninhabited structures in Cheung Chau, to facets encountered from her travels abroad. Cheng’s play with depths of field allows one passageway to frame another. She conjures an intricate network of portals that transitions the viewer from naked reality to imagined dreamscapes.

“In the name of the moon, I’ll punish you!” is the iconic provocation of Sailor Moon, the Japanese-anime beautiful schoolgirl moon soldier, before she strikes her enemy villains. Just punishment is the result of fair judgment, and vigilantism is the reaction when justice cannot be sought officially. Reflecting on the recent socialmovement in Hong Kong since June 2019, the painter evokes her disillusionment with heroism. Paradoxically, as the leaderless movement falters, Cheng finds herself yearning for a hero who can magically turn the tide and miraculously punish all evil doers. Against romanticism and naivete, heroism and justice are nowhere to be found.

Cheng confronts how this world now occurs to her by pivoting from the expansive exteriority of landscapes to the intrusive interiority of gargantuan human figures. Teenage girls with bricks (2020) depicts a scene on the streets where gendered roles are clearly defined and women were discouraged from moving forward to the front. The huddling brick-digging girls stage a quiet protest against the testosterone-driven narrative of male heroism. The vulnerability of the female body becomes utterly visceral in Beer, Weed and Spinach (2020), when after a night of binging, the artist uncontrollably retches and purges everything from within. The complete collapse of bodily systems mirrors that of the society at large, except the purge never ends. Dysfunction pervades in Memory stretches as long as a rail (2020), where a man-beast on a skateboard slides defeatedly across sabotaged rails, its genitals and limbs flaccid despite stimulation. Wrecked, wretched and wrought, we all live in the rot, but some of us gaze at the moon.

Cheng Yin Ngan draws inspiration and recurring motifs from daily and childhood surroundings. In her recent work Wanderer Blues, which depicts an airplane traversing the city sky, the artist induces the multifarious sensations of aviation, including the kiddy wonder of flying and the expansiveness in face of the novelty of the unknown. In her earlier works from 2017, Ngan draws on the experiences of observing ships in seascapes, dramatising the inverse desire between the interiority of the boat and the exteriority of the sea-viewers.