Jiang Cheng's cropped, kaleidoscopic portraits of a single visage are born out of a commitment to explore the psychological and procedural codes of portraiture.
Read MoreBorn in Zhejiang, China, Jiang Cheng received a BFA from the China Academy of Art, Hangzhou, before achieving an MFA from the school's Department of Painting in 2012.
Each executed in a single sitting, Jiang Cheng's portraits blend Eastern and Western influences, while his kaleidoscopic colour palette and cropped compositions obstruct a clear reading of gender, race, or sexuality, as seen in U-02 (2018) and e-1 (2019). Rather, Jiang Cheng's portraits are born out of commitment to explore the psychological and procedural codes of portraiture.
Spotlighting the artist's solo booth at the 2022 Independent Art Fair with Downs & Ross, Ocula Magazine explained, 'The artist's nearly kaleidoscopic recursion of a single visage in each of these works, telescoping possibly infinite moments shared with the same figure, dually concentrates the recursive engagements with his subjects while effecting the universalising potency of patterned repetition.'
Jiang Cheng's solo exhibitions and group exhibitions include U, Downs & Ross, New York (2021); Golden Flow, CHAO Art Center, Beijing (2020); Vertigo, A+Contemporary, Shanghai (2019); Samen, de Sarthe, Beijing (2016), among others.
His works can be found in the permanent collection of the Institute of Contemporary Art (ICA) Miami.
Jiang Cheng's Instagram can be found here.
Annabel Downes | Ocula | 2022