Photographs by Wendy Cheng

Wendy Cheng is an artist and geographer living in Los Angeles. She is also currently a doctoral candidate in the department of American Studies & Ethnicity at University of Southern California.

From 1998-1999 she traveled to Taiwan and Japan on a George Peabody Gardner Fellowship, completing a photography project focused on ideas of urban landscape. In 2002 she received the Dorothea Lange Fellowship in documentary photography and had her first solo show at the Taiwanese American Community Center in San Diego. Her work has been included in shows at Southern Exposure and SomArts Gallery (San Francisco), Los Angeles Contemporary Exhibitions (Los Angeles), and A/P/A Institute (New York).

I first became interested in “landscape” not in its conventional sense of beautiful scenery, but as a concept encompassing the way in which people and the spaces they occupy create each other: a landscape of the everyday. I’ve come to see that through photography, which is a stopping of time and the framing of a moment in space, everyday life can be gifted with metaphor. My everyday life is filled with wonder and dismay—and I think I’m not alone. To try to be faithful to that ambivalence, I work at the intersections of fascination and repulsion, beauty and grotesquerie, the ordinary and the extraordinary.

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