Hsiao-Ron Cheng

I'm a huge fan of Taiwanese artist Hsiao-Ron Cheng, an imaginative young woman based in Taipei. She creates delicate surrealistic concepts of a dreamy and sometimes nightmarish fantasy world of innocence reminiscent of her childhood. You can tell her work has been deliciously influenced by Mark Ryden - and what's not to love about it? Cheng's work is based on a pastel-hued pale palette, with muted shades of pink and green, flowery details, bunnies, fragile girls, botanical elements and overall a haunting sense of melancholy. Her illustrations reveal soft shapes and an exquisite technique - truly inspiring!

 In my childhood, the wall in my room was always filled with illustration books. 

The magical fantasy adventure stories with many great illustrations were my favorites. 

They inspired me to start to imagine my own world. 

I guess I’m just so OK with not being “happy” everyday and just embracing every true sensations I have… the stories or movies with sad tragic endings are attractive to me, more than comedies. I think maybe the touching feeling I enjoy after finish the sad story is one of the reasons I rarely choose joyous things to be my subject matters.

All the entangled plants shown in my work symbolize the unbearable emotions and feelings in real life. In my imagination, they keep growing up and slowly twining together. The woodland landscapes or flora worlds describe a strong feeling of oppression including all kind of sensation that happened to me all the time. 

I feel like being trapped by those emotions and there seems no way out. My aim is to create more complex worlds with complicated stories of childlike and cruel creatures, and combine them together into one big world.