Chengwei Geng (b. 1998, China), a London-based painter who likes to say, “I can’t just talk to the dead all the time!”
Raised by a psychoanalyst mother and a detective father, she’s got a knack for blending memory, humor, and a dash of old-soul curiosity into her art. She treats her lifelong disability like a badge of resilience and will tell you, “Life is what you make of it.”
Now that you’ve seen her freckles and crooked glasses, feel free to scroll down for the full story.
At the core of my practice lies a preoccupation with memory—both real and imagined—and how it shapes our identities, relationships, and desires. I paint to translate the invisible architecture of emotional life into something tangible. The works often emerge from fragments of writing, poetry, and philosophy, drawing on psychoanalytic thought, literature, and myth.
My canvases, act as sites where private experience becomes a collective one. Figures and forms are distorted, layered, and reconfigured, echoing the instability of recollection. I often revisit the same motifs—a recurring room, a dream, a letter—treating them as archetypes rather than narratives, symbols that resist final explanation.
Formally, I work with oil paint on stretched canvas, embracing its material depth and its history within painting. My brushwork oscillates between gestural expressionism and quiet restraint, reflecting the tension between exposure and concealment that underpins memory itself.
Influenced by psychoanalytic theory, mythology, and literary modernism, my work inhabits a space where personal mythology and collective inheritance overlap. I am drawn to what feels both intimate and universal: longing, grief, resilience, and the endless search for meaning.
Painting, for me, is not about resolution. It is about creating spaces where contradictions can coexist, where the private and the public, the wounded and the hopeful, the past and the present, all remain in dialogue.