Lu Cheng

Lu Cheng is a multidisciplinary artist born in 1996 in Shanghai, whose practice unfolds at the intersection of sculpture, installation, and spatial research. Her work, grounded in a rigorous exploration of materials and forms, questions the boundaries between the living and the constructed, the organic and the artificial.

After studying industrial design at the China Academy of Art (2014–2016), she has been pursuing a degree in graphic arts in Peter Kogler's class at the Academy of Fine Arts Munich since 2018 — one of Europe's most prestigious art institutions. This dual grounding — between East and West, between design and fine arts — feeds a deeply hybrid practice, attentive to processes of transformation and formal evolution.

In her ceramic, metal, and plastic installations, Lu Cheng explores biomorphic forms and the relationships between organic and constructed structures. Her works are not direct representations of nature: they are pseudo-natural objects — autonomous entities that seem to grow, evolve, and transform within space. Through constant material experimentation, she places the concept of growth — understood as a form of "becoming" — at the heart of her research. The body, as a hybrid entity in perpetual transformation shaped by its environment, runs through all of her installations, carrying notions of fragility, resilience, and metamorphosis.

As part of the Les Gardiennes de la Mer artistic residency at Résidences Rocabella, Lu Cheng engages with the coastal landscape as a living laboratory, in direct resonance with the questions that run through her entire practice: growth, transformation, and the relationships between organic structures and environment. The sea — a space in perpetual motion, subject to the forces of life and the erosive processes of time — offers her exceptionally rich territory for exploration.

Facing the Mediterranean shoreline, she observes the forms that water, salt, and wind sculpt into matter — rocks, shells, marine organisms — allowing these natural processes to feed her sculptural research into biomorphic forms. This residency offers her a space for new material and conceptual experimentation, between the ceramics and metal she habitually works with and the substances the sea itself produces. The coastline thus becomes a place of becoming: forms in gestation, suspended at the boundary between the natural and the artificial.