Julietta Cheung is a visual artist. She was born in Hong Kong and has lived in Paris, New York and Chicago. Cheung’s work has been exhibited in Europe and the United States, and has appeared in online and print publications such as Jacket2, Creative Capital’s On Our Radar! and others. She has lectured about her practice and discussed the relationship between contemporary art and design at various venues across the United States. Her writing was recently published by Kenning Editions in Ordinance: A Critical Series. She holds an MFA from the School of the Art Institute of Chicago where she was the recipient of the New Artist Trustee’s Merit Scholarship and the Betsy Karp MFA Award. She has been Assistant Professor of Art at Florida State University since 2013.
MFA School of the Art Institute of Chicago
Cheung’s work deals with the negotiation between the self and society in a spatial context. Central to her practice is her interest in modernist and experimental literature, and in the contemporary and popular uses of language. She explores her chosen source (a work of literature, a genre study, buzz terms and so on) through her role as its reader to investigate its origins, peripheries, and associations, and how the reader is emplaced within it. She often inhabits her source as if it is an interior landscape to examine how placement, sightlines, and perceptual relationships might bear on its subjective and socially-precipitated interpretations. Just as language and the built world are social forms that construct how we are inscribed within their borders, Cheung uses text and reference familiar cues from everyday conventions to interrogate how these forms corroborate each other to contain or disrupt our interpretive horizon. Her work merges sculpture, graphics, photography and appropriative writing within installations that posit how we might understand the self and the experience of being in society differently despite the entirely designed, defined and programmed nature of our contemporary condition.
True Exposure (2013–14)
Elinors (2015)
“Participation as Commodity,” presented at College Art Association’s Annual Conference in 2014.
“Minoritarian Enunciation and Global Product Culture,” Ordinance: A Critical Series. Chicago: Kenning Editions. 2015.