Chaoming Zheng

Chaoming Zheng (Sadie) is an artist based in Shanghai and London.

She received a BA in Literature from Fudan University, and is currently in a two-year MA program at Royal College of Art. Building her own artistic world around satirical, grotesque, and epiphanic features, her art hinges on embodiment and reproducibility, discussing how the attachment to wounds can influence one’s state of existence.

I have been trying to capture some mysterious animals. I call them "pseudo-horses" as they look like apparitions of horses with disturbing glitches: twisted necks, fragmented torsos, too many heads or too many legs. They are inspired by a nonsensical yet poetic chat history of me asking an AI Chatbot to describe their "encounter with a horse from a place where meaning is destroyed."

These algorithms were developed and fed by bits and pieces of our world, turning them into a library or a funhouse mirror reflecting the collective human knowledge. Through the crazy imaginations of "apophenia", a person can read poetry from a sea of seemingly pointless texts, or recognise faces from deformed images produced by malfunctioning. And this is the method I adopted to converse with a chatbot, or a disembodied echo with ourselves.

In The Poetics of Space, Gaston Bachelard wrote, "in order to sense, across the years, our attachment for the house we were born in, a dream is more powerful than a thought." My works are not only inspired by a selection of low-quality deformed horse images, but can also be traced back to the childhood apartment where I spent my formative years, dreaming the dreams of a father's daughter surrounded by ghosts of those magnificent, well-formed animals of masculine glory – the equestrian vehicles for ancient warriors, nobles, and kings.

I make drawings, prints, and small sculptures as artefacts of "pseudo-horses" in the "crimson purple woods" – a dreamy shadowy place where they arise from and shape-shift freely. They are combined with found objects I collect around the city during my time in London. Broken dollhouses, abandoned rocking horses, old fireplace surrounds are mingled with acrylic, fabrics, clay, or metal, forming installations to represent a wild mutation of that prolonged childhood and teenage dream.

It's time to transcend the myths and lies of the halcyon old days, but kindly don’t perish silently like your mother or castrate yourself for your father. In the lingering residues of that nightmare, there might be hope.