Xinyi Cheng

Xinyi Cheng (b. 1989, Wuhan, China) is a painter who lives and works in Paris. She studied at the Maryland Institute College of Art before moving to Paris in 2017.

Her paintings take as their starting point what she calls "situations" — scenes from memory or imagination in which people, animals, and objects appear in intimate or ambiguous configurations. She draws on her own life: friends and models who pose for her, objects in her home, paintings encountered in museums. Her references are heterogeneous: Japanese woodblock prints, Tiepolo, the cropped textures of film stills. Color and composition in her work produce a quality of unease within apparent domesticity, as if the scene depicted carries emotional information that is just beyond legible articulation. Her subjects, she has said, share "a state of estrangement."

She received the Baloise Art Prize at Art Basel in 2019, which led to a solo museum exhibition at Hamburger Bahnhof in Berlin (2020). Her first solo show in the United States was presented at Matthew Marks Gallery, New York, in 2022; Seen Through Others was her first French institutional solo, presented at Lafayette Anticipations, Paris, in 2022. In 2025, her work was featured in Copistes at the Centre Pompidou-Metz, organized in collaboration with the Louvre, and she presented Sing to It, her first solo exhibition in Los Angeles, at Matthew Marks Gallery. Her work is held by the Alte Nationalgalerie in Berlin and the Pinault Collection.