AAIS Alumni Series: The Floating Life

AAIS Alumni Yuyang Cheng returns to the Studio for an evening of performance and exchange about her current work.

Yuyang is a cross-disciplinary experimental theatre and moving-image artist, and the founder, director, and artistic director of Spectator Experimental Theatre (SET Production Co.). She studied at the School of Architecture, Central Academy of Fine Arts, and holds a Master’s degree from UCL Bartlett School of Architecture and a Master’s degree with Distinction from the AA School of Architecture. Her practice focuses on the spirit of place created through spatial, visual, and installation design, with architectural spatial narrative as its core method, integrating physical performance, moving image, and new media. Her representative work, the experimental environmental theatre series The Floating Life Performance Series, has been presented at the Edinburgh Festival Fringe and the OFF Festival of the Festival d’Avignon (2022, 2023, 2025, 2026). She was commissioned as an artist by the China Shanghai International Arts Festival’s Rising Artists’ Works programme (2025). The work received the Most Communication Value Award at the Broadway China Prism Theatre Festival（2024）, a dedicated feature in Tate etc. (2023), and Best Young Director at the London New Wave Short Film Awards (2024). Her works have also been exhibited in a solo exhibition at the CAFA Art Museum（2024）, as well as at London Design Week (2023) and Beijing Design Week (2024).

Cheng’s artistic practice takes time, memory, and cultural-philosophical speculation as core creative materials, connecting traditional Chinese cultural spirit with future-oriented digital expression. She excavates classical Chinese landscape aesthetics, literati spirit, and Eastern natural philosophy, reinterpreting historical cultural memory through contemporary moving image, spatial installation, and performative narrative. Treating time as a malleable medium, she connects traditional cultural lineage, present urban existence, and future speculative imagination, reflecting on how culture and identity evolve in the digital era. Parametric technology and immersive media are adopted not for spectacle but to reconstruct cultural memory and reshape the perception of time and space. With humanistic care as its foundation and cross-cultural world language as its expressive core, her practice imagines future possibilities while carrying forward traditional cultural lineage, offering critical reflection and poetic reinterpretation of cultural philosophy, memory, and technological temporality.

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