Cheng Tsun-shing

Cheng Tsun-shing (b. 1952, Taipei) lives and works in Taipei. He received his PhD from École des Hautes Études en Sciences Sociales. He is the Founder of Flâneur Culture Lab and taught at the National Tsing Hua University for more than 20 years. Cheng was the recipient of Ordre des Arts et des Lettres (Officier) in 2012. He continues to work in the field of aesthetics, philosophy, psychoanalysis, and visual discourse, and works as a photographer, art critic, writer, and film director.

In 1992 he wrote Melencolia Document reflecting on aesthetics, values, and worldviews through writing and imagery, which greatly altered aesthetic thinking in the Taiwanese art world. Photography is a vital activity for him, and amidst the digital flood of images stored as signals and arrays, he employs silver halide processes to remind us of the irreversibility of light imaging’s materiality, emphasizing this irreversibility as the core practice of photographic aesthetics.

His solo exhibitions include Pictures of Fleeting Lives in Luzhou (Taipei, 1975), Won’t Somebody Bring the Light (Central Academy of Fine Arts Museum, Shanghai Minsheng Art Museum, 2015), and Firefly and Light (Power Station of Art, Shanghai, 2019). He has also participated in group photography exhibitions at the Guangdong Museum of Art (2009), National Taiwan Museum of Fine Arts (2018), and the Kiyosato Museum of Photographic Arts in Japan.

In 2010, Cheng Tsun-shing lectured at CAA and participated in the forum West Heavens: India-China Summit on Social Thought. In 2011, he participated in the workshop Image VS Spectacle: The Political Economy of Image and Sound.