Spotlight Artist: Lucy Cheung

This week’s Spotlight Artist is Lucy Cheung. Lucy is a British born Chinese artist living and working in Brighton. She received a BA in contemporary creative practice from Leeds Metropolitan University in 2008. She curates an image research blog at www.crushevil.co.uk

Lucy’s work is concerned with intuition, imagination and romanticism. It is based on drawing not from observation but an interpretation of the way things appear in the dimension of thoughts and dreams. These are her own small worlds, giving life to the imaginary in material form.  Lucy is interested in the escape of being absolutely absorbed in the activity of making; existing in the illusory. She is particularly inspired by shamanism, ritual, ancient traditions, the occult, primitivism, body art, anthropomorphic ceramics, art brut, jellyfish, superstition, bright colours and dark things.

To get to know Lucy a bit better, we did a short Q&A with her: 

Tell us a bit more about your relationship to shamanism, the occult, ancient traditions etc.?

 

I think my interest stems from growing up within two different cultures, Chinese and British. There are a lot of superstitions in Chinese culture and my mum upholds most of these beliefs but then there are kind of 'old wives' tales' I heard from school friends that she would find totally ridiculous and vice versa. For example, she believes warts are caused by accidentally having a fish scale land on your skin that has stuck there when you are de-scaling fish...And then there is the old wives' tale that you can get rid of a wart by rubbing a potato on it and then burying it in the garden. My mum would scoff at this potato cure but I really enjoy both of these concepts! I feel quite in between both cultures and don't feel like I'm completely Chinese or British so I'm really curious about other cultural beliefs but particularly about magic, transformation and anything that is kind of 'other'. 

 

What are your highlights with Debut Contemporary so far? 

 

The workshops have been excellent, I'm learning a lot about how to progress my art practice and it's great to meet other artists going through the same things. 

 

What’s your favourite YouTube link?

 

Bert & Ernie tries Gangsta Rap 

 

Best person to follow on Twitter is…

 

@Friendswithyou 

 

If you could invite anyone over for dinner at your place, who would it be? 

 

Hmm a real life Totoro from My Neighbour Totoro? We could just eat cakes. 

 

Do you have an interesting fact for us? 

 

I only learnt to swim this year. I'm 27. 

Supergross 

www.lucycheung.com