Today we’d like to introduce you to Ching Ching Cheng.
Ching Ching, we’d love to hear your story and how you got to where you are today both personally and as an artist.
I was born in Taiwan and moved to the United States when I was 21 years old attending college. After school, I got married and in three years, I gave birth to my first child. Now I am a mother of two, a four-year-old boy and a two-year-old girl. Having kids changed everything. It is an amazing experience but at the same time, it was the hardest duty as a human being physically and mentally. A new journey began, not only being an artist, but also being a wife and a mother. Being the first generation of immigrant married to a Caucasian man in modern time, and now raising kids who are hapa, a person who is partially of Asian or Pacific Islander descent, makes me interest in understanding and investigating more of what is identity. How we perceive our identities and also how others perceive identities. How identities change and adapt through time, social status, and environments.
We’d love to hear more about your art. What do you do you do and why and what do you hope others will take away from your work?
Exploring identities psychologically in different ethnicity backgrounds, cultures, genders, and environment conditions is my multidisciplinary practice through drawings, paintings, sculptures, installation, photography and video work. Human beings naturally change and adapt their living into different environments with different stages in our life. When people migrate, they bring their cultures and identities with them. Sometimes the culture and identity that they bring with them changes and adapts to that new environment, and it changes to a modified new culture or a subculture, and a distinct identity. I am also interested in the relationship between identities and space.
The space is not only the physical environment and locations, but also the cultural, social, economic and political aspect of the space. How identities were defined through space, and the notion and ideology of what identities mean in the relation to its space. Adapting, resisting, transforming, and accepting are stages of in between, and this process of progression becomes the focus of my work. What we once were and what we have become is a cognitive representation of one’s own identity. As a first-generation immigrant myself, now married and have two young mixed-race children, I always put myself in the situation to make the subject matter more personal to me. My work gives an intimate and personal account of my own experiences in transition stages of changes in my own identity, while open and encourage the viewers for further discussions about the connections and bridges of global society.
What do you know now that you wished you had learned earlier?
Keep up with the good work!
Contact Info:
- Website: chingchingcheng.com
- Phone: 3106992351
- Email: kinoko477@gmail.com
- Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/chingchingcheng/
- Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/ching.cheng.568
Image Credit:
ching ching cheng
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