Jiang Cheng

Jiang Cheng’s paintings draw their focus from the capacity for emotional depth contained within the expressions of the human face. They can almost be considered ciphers, conduits for a varying span of identity and connotation. His paintings are expressive, intuitive, and moving, capturing the nature of the human condition. Each numbered painting is completed in a single sitting, with every paint stroke remaining visible on the canvas. Cheng does not wish to expunge any gesture from the surface of his paintings. The outcome of his approach to painting is an otherworldly, dreamlike fluidity. His subjects are obscured and cropped to the point that the context of the gender and racial identity of his sitters is removed. Cheng draws reference from a breadth of sources, from the art historical canon of portraiture to surveillance technologies. His imagined or real subjects are defined by the emotions they convey, and yet owe much to abstraction. Through his honest, unedited mark-making, Cheng’s blurred and overlaid depictions of the human face exist across multiple temporalities.