Meicheng Chi
DRAWINGMeicheng Chi 迟美橙 (She/Her) is a multidisciplinary artist and designer currently based in New York. With a BFA in Industrial Design and a Concentration in Drawing from Rhode Island School of Design (RISD) in 2022, she seamlessly bridges the realms of fine art, illustration, and fashion accessories design. Her creative practice transcends conventional boundaries, allowing her to explore emotional and material connections across different mediums. Meicheng’s work has been exhibited in prestigious galleries across China, the U.S., and Europe, garnering international attention. In 2023, her drawing series ‘Sleep Talking’ was archived by the Museum of Avant-garde, a significant recognition of her evolving artistic voice. Her artistic journey centers on the intuitive act of drawing, which she views as the purest form of emotional expression. Through her artworks, Meicheng taps into deeply personal experiences and dreamlike states, creating pieces that resonate with softness and emotional depth, inviting viewers to share in her introspective narratives.
JUNE 04, 2025
Hi Meicheng, your artistic practice centers on drawings and illustrations. How are you inspired in your creative process?
For me, drawing is like sleep talk and there is always a breeze with the smell of grass. To expand, half-awake memories are always the most vivid ones for me. It allows me to record the soft and moist scenes in my subconscious. In dreams, I can fly over water and land in just a few minutes, with various thoughts overlapping with imaginations, slowly sinking into summer. Emotions and memories can melt onto paper and fly out of the window…
For me, drawing is like sleep talk and there is always a breeze with the smell of grass. To expand, half-awake memories are always the most vivid ones for me. It allows me to record the soft and moist scenes in my subconscious. In dreams, I can fly over water and land in just a few minutes, with various thoughts overlapping with imaginations, slowly sinking into summer. Emotions and memories can melt onto paper and fly out of the window…
You mentioned dreams and half-awake memories. How does drawing help you realize these vague and obscure moments?
Drawing always speaks the unspeakable for me. I first began working with colored pencils to capture memories from dream states after dreaming about my great-grandfather’s house. In the dream, I stood in his kitchen and watched a few birds fly by. When I turned back, they had transformed into flat patterns on the window. Though I was half-awake, the images felt vivid, tender, and deeply touching. I wanted to preserve the lines, colors, and emotional intensity of that moment. Since then, drawing has felt like sleep-talking, a way to express half-awakened memories in their most vivid form. Creating allows me to transform the romantic imagery of my unconscious mind and faded memories into new, unknown images and stories, or to let those images surface into my consciousness. I fold and unfold my memories, cherishing each crease.
Can you talk more about your larger emotional and creative landscape — like fragments of a place, a relationship, or an inner world?
Yes. I draw inspiration from the interesting and touching fragments of my life and memories—rooms I want to remember, things I fear losing, people I long to meet, fleeting emotions I experience, or even the mundane details of everyday life. I strive to capture the feelings and emotions that emerge when I encounter these moments or people, shaped by a particular temperature, bathed in a specific hue of light, and set against textures that resonate with me. I fold and unfold my memories, cherishing each crease as if they were moments from my life or fragments of my imagination—hugging and keeping every delicate line. Through my work, I aim to translate these ephemeral experiences onto paper, weaving a poetic connection between memory and the present.
You also work as a fashion accessories designer. What is the difference between working on paper and with hand-held items?
Coming from an industrial design background, I naturally consider function when creating objects meant to be held or used. In contrast, drawing allows me to be completely unreasonable, intuitive, and emotionally driven. That said, I often experiment with bringing this drawing mindset into other mediums, like ceramics or even footwear design. I try to translate my poetic, intimate, and tender visual language into these functional forms — blurring the line between utility and emotion, and seeing where that tension can lead.
Are there any objects or symbols you feel emotionally connected to?
Chairs often appear in my work and have gradually become central characters in many of my pieces. My connection with chairs began unexpectedly—one day, I passed a workroom at my college and caught a glimpse of a chair through its small window. In that moment, I felt an electric shock, as if the chair were alive. I like how chairs seem to be talking, but never talk too much.
Have you been exploring any new ways of creative expression?
Last year, I began working with clay to transform the ideas, thoughts, and images in my mind into tangible ceramic objects and sculptures. Clay opened up new possibilities for expression — allowing the little chairs and imagined scenes from my drawings to come to life in three dimensions. Because I was still unfamiliar with the material, and due to the inherently unpredictable nature of clay and glaze, my pieces often carry a sense of lovely imperfection and vivid spontaneity. I embrace that unpredictability and let the process guide me. Ceramics has become a way for me to turn memories into something physical and honest — something that can be shared and emotionally resonate with others.
What do you want your audiences to take away from viewing your work?
I allow my emotions, feelings, vulnerability, memories and experiences to shape my work organically, and hope to inspire others to connect with a tender part of their inner world.