Jessica Cheng
Jessica Cheng is the first Chinese-Costa Rican sculptress, born and raised in a traditional Chinese family in Costa Rica.
The concept and aesthetics of her work revolve around human emotion, its behavior and the relationship between all sentient beings. Her work combines different techniques, such as the modeling of clay, sculpting of stone, carving of wood and forging, welding, embossing, and casting of metals.
Jessica Cheng graduated from the University of Costa Rica in 2010 where she majored in sculpture. Since then, she has had a strong passion for the handling of metal, with which she began her series "The Disalienation", created with pigmented ferrocement, engraving, forging and the embossing of iron and copper. This series projects the critical moment of the detachment from the social disguise that each person wears to belong to a specific community; when disalienation occurs and one goes back to being who one is in essence. The sculptress gave her example by being a Chinese person, who was not accepted by the oriental community as one of them, as well as the Costa Rican who in their eyes was Chinese. Discovering that she had been unsuccessfully struggling to belong, she shedded the disguise she had been using to walk within each culture and decided to be herself: a “hybrid” who shared both cultures and belonged to none but herself. Another of the main topics worked by Jessica Cheng is the animalistic in connection with her spirituality. Currently, she’s working on the series “Coinhabitants” on which she expresses her love for her co-inhabitants on this planet, the animals. Through this collection she wants to create awareness in the viewers for all beings in this world, their importance, their existence, their vulnerability and their role in this universe. Currently, Jessica Cheng dedicates her work to everything that represents her, including the mixture of materials as a metaphor to her cultural identity, her most recurring being wood and metal, uniting them in harmony and in tune with her own being.