Wing See Wincy Cheng

At the beginning of my degree, I used the idea of dolls as emotional vessels. I saw them as elegant, silent, and familiar entities I could project onto without needing to fully reveal myself. They became surrogates for things I couldn’t articulate directly. Growing up, I often felt like a disruption to the symbolic order - intense, emotional - too strange to fit in. I learned to protect myself by creating art, it became a way to build a world to which I could point to and say “These feelings belong there”. I painted them physically and digitally, using these vessels as my emotional exorcists. I began sculpting in clay, then moved into digital scanning, modelling, and 3D printing—watching them get taller, gain number, and presence.

My practice still begins from that impulse: to make visible the inner architecture of emotional experience, and to speak to the people who feel estranged by the surface of things. I don’t want to explain my internal world, I want to externalise it, to sculpt my thoughts into something others can sense present. My process often begins with touch, using tangible forms such as clay, paint, or found materials. This stage is messy, it is a ritualistic struggle translating the visceral into the deliberate form of an idea - I refuse to work with the medium alone - instead I use absolutely everything. Withstanding an accidental injury to my finger weaving “Web of Chains”, I sealed my flesh in resin and adorned the piece with it. I’ve always felt the affirmative difference in Francis Bacon’s raw language should be illuminated - “All painting is an accident. But it’s also not an accident, because one must select what part of the accident one chooses to preserve.” I bring the same determination of choice when bringing my work in 2D and 3D virtual environments, where scale, shapes, and forms distort in surreal ways. This fluid movement between dimensions allows my ideas to travel and reconnect, forming a rhythmic loop between touch, translation, and return. In my art, I often create through proxy by manifesting visual doubles that allow me to confront personal fears and anxieties at one remove. My practice mirrors Freud’s idea of the uncanny: the unpleasant feeling when something familiar suddenly becomes unfamiliar. Freud once described this moment: “the double has become a thing of terror, just as... the gods turned into demons” (Freud, 1919, p.235). Referencing that unsettling reversal when something you’ve created by investing yourself stares back at you as an other. This shaped the way I approach these silent self-portraits. They no longer only function as an expression of emotions or identities, but as mirrors that reflect me back in unfamiliar ways, revealing parts of myself I have not yet realised. Creating my first ‘baby’ sculpture marked a turning point in Year 2. I slowly developed an unexpected maternal attachment to the sculpture, making me question whether I was just the artist who created these beings or if it’s something more entangled. When I Digitally sculpted the first Frogusus, I noticed that the act of automated production in plastic introduced a distance that was worth exploring. My work passes over the flux present when an idea passes through different states of being - when something hand-held, even physically nurtured becomes intangible, then returns again in commodified form. That moment reframed my relationship to them, not just as permanent creations, but as strange ephemeral echoes of myself and my audience, their identity— a fragile multiplicity.

Luce Irigaray’s concept of mimesis gave me a political and aesthetic strategy to work through this. She writes about “submitting women to stereotypical views... to call the views themselves into question” (Irigaray, 1985, p.76). My use of the feminine uncanny: the overly adorned figure, the mirrored body, the doll-face as decoration draws directly from this tactic. I mimic visual codes of femininity until they start to unravel. In one digital painting,I depicted a female doll figure wearing a gown made from duplicates of her own face. I explore the notion of the feminine uncanny as an evental site where difference is extracted from repetition.

A recent development in my practice extends from the Frogusus—a series of 3D models combining doll-like faces with animalistic and gential forms. These works reflect a fictional logic: what might a Frogusus learn about humanity through scraps of online data? Influenced by NieR: Automata and its machine lifeforms who imitate human behaviour without understanding it, they attempt to reconstruct desire, body, and identity through symbolic repetition. Referencing John Searle’s Chinese Room experiment (1980), I want to question whether the manipulation of symbols related to pleasure and embodiment can be conducive to real understanding or experience. These creatures I create can perform knowledge, but do they remain outside of it?

The project also draws on Lacanian psychoanalysis, particularly the phallus as a symbol of lack and incompletion (Lacan, 1977). These beings are empty signifiers thrown far and deep into my production cycle, skipping touch and fast-forwarding through software sculpting into 3D printed moulds for mass-production, commodified and uncannily appealing. Their adorable little faces disrupt the organic discomfort associated with genital imagery. Their gestures are borrowed and their desires are inherited. I use surreal humour to expose these artificial figures that mimic what they cannot feel, navigating human absurdity without fully entering it.

As my creative practices continue to evolve, I’m interested in experimenting how my creatures and constructed identities might move beyond their static forms. I expand into holographic technologies and game-building platforms by developing interactive environments where viewers experience feedback when interacting with my work.