Between Plant and Body: Cheng Chang’s Unnamed Life-Forms

What happens when a plant begins to resemble a body—and a body begins to lose its human form?

In Cheng Chang’s paintings, familiar categories become deliberately unstable. Leaves resemble organs, roots behave like limbs, and soft vegetal forms take on an almost bodily presence. Her strange organisms appear recognizable at first, yet resist being identified as any known species.

Born in Ningbo in 2002 and educated at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago and Chelsea College of Arts, Cheng Chang works primarily through acrylic painting to explore the unstable boundaries between plant, body, environment, and imagined future life.

Rather than illustrating existing species, she constructs a speculative visual ecology: a world in which human beings are no longer the unquestioned center of biological experience.

Cheng Chang’s Paintings Begin with Observation

Although the organisms in Cheng Chang’s work often appear surreal or science-fictional, their starting point is closely connected to observation.

Plants are particularly important.

Their roots, surfaces, growth patterns, resilience, and capacity to adapt provide a visual vocabulary from which unfamiliar bodies begin to emerge.

Yet these paintings are not botanical illustrations.

Instead of reproducing the appearance of a specific plant, Cheng transforms observed structures into what might be called speculative morphology—imagined forms that borrow from biology without belonging entirely to it.

A root may become a limb.

A petal may begin to resemble skin.

A cavity inside a plant-like structure may suggest an organ.

The familiar becomes unstable.

That instability is central to her practice.

Between Plant and Human Body

One of the most striking characteristics of Cheng Chang’s acrylic paintings is the persistent presence of the body even when no conventional human figure appears.

There may be no face, portrait, or recognizable anatomy.

Yet bodily associations remain everywhere.

Folds resemble tissue.

Openings suggest cavities.

Rounded volumes appear to swell, contract, or grow.

Surfaces seem capable of being touched.

These forms exist somewhere between botanical and anatomical imagery.

This ambiguity creates what is often described in contemporary art as a biomorphic language—forms that evoke living organisms without reproducing a specific biological structure.

In Cheng’s work, biomorphic painting becomes a way to question the boundaries through which humans classify life.

Where does a plant end and an animal begin?

At what point does a form become a body?

And why do viewers instinctively try to assign unfamiliar organisms to known categories?

Acrylic Painting as a Material Language

The choice of acrylic paint is also significant.

Acrylic allows artists to move quickly between opaque color, transparent layering, sharp edges, soft transitions, and highly constructed surfaces.

In Cheng Chang’s paintings, this flexibility supports the transformation between biological forms.

One passage may appear smooth and almost skin-like.

Another may resemble membrane, vegetation, tissue, or an unidentified organic surface.

Layers can accumulate without requiring the prolonged drying time associated with traditional oil painting, allowing forms to be repeatedly modified, covered, expanded, and reconstructed.

The result is not simply a depiction of strange organisms.

The painting itself begins to behave like a process of growth.

From Ningbo to Chicago and London

Cheng Chang’s artistic development has taken place across several cultural and educational environments.

Born in Ningbo, China, she later studied at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago and Chelsea College of Arts in London.

Exposure to different artistic contexts helped expand her practice beyond formal experimentation with shapes and surfaces.

Questions of ecology, anthropocentrism, biological adaptation, and possible future social structures increasingly became part of the conceptual framework surrounding the work.

Yet the paintings do not function as direct illustrations of ecological theory.

They remain deliberately ambiguous.

This matters.

Rather than presenting a predetermined argument about the environment, Cheng constructs situations in which the relationship between human and non-human life becomes uncertain.

The viewer has to negotiate that uncertainty.

Beyond Human-Centered Classification

Human beings tend to understand the natural world through classification.

Plant.

Animal.

Human.

Organ.

Landscape.

Body.

Cheng Chang’s paintings continually interfere with these categories.

Her organisms appear to belong to several systems simultaneously.

This can be understood in relation to anthropocentrism—the tendency to position human beings as the central or most significant form of life through which the wider environment is interpreted.

By creating organisms that resist familiar classification, Cheng imagines biological relationships in which the human body is no longer the default reference point.

A plant does not simply exist as decoration.

A body does not necessarily have to be human.

An organism does not need to fit an established category.

This shift gives the work an ecological dimension without turning it into conventional environmental imagery.

Fantasy Is a Method, Not an Escape

The science-fiction atmosphere within Cheng’s work could easily be misunderstood as fantasy for its own sake.

But fantasy here operates as a method of inquiry.

By placing biological forms slightly outside the conditions of present-day reality, the artist creates enough distance to reconsider questions that might otherwise appear fixed.

What happens when species adapt to unfamiliar environments?

How might organisms evolve under different ecological pressures?

What kinds of relationships between humans, plants, and other forms of life might emerge in the future?

What would a world look like if human beings were no longer positioned at its conceptual center?

The paintings do not provide literal answers.

Instead, speculative imagery makes these questions visible.

Ecological Art Without Illustration

Contemporary ecological art does not always depict recognizable landscapes, endangered animals, or environmental disasters.

Sometimes ecology appears through relationships.

Cheng Chang’s work belongs closer to this second approach.

Her paintings consider how bodies relate to environments, how organisms transform, and how boundaries between different forms of life might become unstable.

Ecology becomes less a subject being represented than a system being imagined.

This distinction is important.

A painting does not need to contain a forest to think about ecology.

It can instead ask how one life-form exists in relation to another.

An Artist Building a Visual Ecosystem

Seen individually, one of Cheng Chang’s organisms may appear like an isolated fantasy creature.

Seen across multiple paintings and studies, something more systematic begins to emerge.

Forms return.

Textures repeat.

Biological structures mutate.

Certain types of bodies seem to belong to the same imagined environment.

In this sense, Cheng is not simply painting individual creatures.

She is gradually constructing a visual ecosystem.

The significance of the practice lies in the consistency with which this world begins to establish its own biological logic.

One painting introduces a form.

Another modifies it.

A later work may reveal something that appears related but has adapted differently.

This gives the wider body of work a sense of continuity beyond individual compositions.

How Collectors Can Read Cheng Chang’s Work

For collectors of contemporary painting, the most productive way to approach Cheng Chang’s work may be to resist the immediate desire to identify exactly what each organism represents.

Instead, consider several elements.

Look at the relationship between plant and body

Which parts feel vegetal?

Which feel anatomical?

Where do the two become impossible to separate?

Observe how the surface is constructed

Look closely at layers, transitions, edges, texture, and opacity.

Acrylic is not simply the material listed on the artwork label; its physical behavior is part of how these organisms become believable.

Follow recurring forms across different works

Individual paintings gain additional meaning when seen as part of a developing visual ecosystem.

Repeated motifs can reveal how Cheng’s imagined world evolves from work to work.

Consider the role of uncertainty

These paintings deliberately resist complete explanation.

That ambiguity should not necessarily be treated as something to solve.

It is part of the work’s conceptual structure.

Frequently Asked Questions About Cheng Chang

Who is Cheng Chang?

Cheng Chang is a contemporary artist born in Ningbo, China, in 2002. Her practice explores hybrid biological forms, plants, bodies, ecology, and speculative future life through painting.

What kind of art does Cheng Chang create?

Her work can be understood through contemporary figurative, biomorphic, ecological, and speculative painting. Rather than depicting conventional human figures or botanical subjects, she creates imagined organisms that combine characteristics of plants and bodies.

What medium does Cheng Chang use?

Cheng Chang works with acrylic on canvas in many of her paintings, using the medium’s capacity for layering, direct color, and surface variation to construct hybrid organic forms.

What themes appear in Cheng Chang’s paintings?

Recurring themes include plants, the human body, biological adaptation, anthropocentrism, ecology, imagined organisms, future societies, and relationships between human and non-human life.

Why do Cheng Chang’s paintings resemble plants and organs?

The ambiguity is intentional.

By combining botanical and bodily structures, Cheng challenges conventional distinctions between plant, animal, and human forms of life.

ArtNorya Curatorial Note

Cheng Chang’s practice becomes most compelling when fantasy functions not as escape, but as a structure for thinking.

Her hybrid organisms do not illustrate a finished ecological argument.

Instead, they keep difficult relationships open:

between plant and body,

human and non-human,

observation and imagination,

present biology and possible future life.

This uncertainty is precisely what gives the paintings their strength.

A viewer may begin by asking what kind of creature is being represented.

But the more interesting question eventually becomes:

Why do we need to decide what kind of creature it is at all?

Through acrylic painting, recurring organisms, and speculative biological structures, Cheng Chang is gradually constructing a world in which the categories humans use to understand life no longer remain stable.

That world is strange—but close enough to our own to make the distinction increasingly uncomfortable.