Cheng Ran was born in 1981 in Inner Mongolia. He moved to Beijing, and graduated from the China Academy of Art in 2004. He currently lives and works in Hangzhou. In 2019 Cheng won the Nomura Emerging Artist Award.
Cheng focuses mainly on new media: his artworks are mostly videos and films. They are created by applying basic cinematic techniques such as simple cutting, rearranging, montage and full-length shots. He uses these tropes to make connections between film references and visual culture, and so to produce fictional worlds and entities.
Cheng is represented by Leo Xu Projects in Shanghai. In 2011 he was one of nine Chinese artists to be included in their inaugural exhibition Sweet Dreams (Are Made of This). Cheng Ran showed his video Chewing Gum Paper (2011), in which balled-up chewing-gum wrappers appear to dance on the vibrating skin of a drum. It is a hypnotic piece with a mesmerising soundtrack that featured an edited loop of Martin Luther King’s ‘I have a dream’ speech.
In 2016, Cheng held his first US solo exhibition at The New Museum in New York. This was the culmination of a three-month residency at the museum. The artist showed a new multi-video installation. Cheng Ran: Diary of a Madman, which borrows its title from a tale written by Lu Xun in 1918, widely considered to be China’s first modern short story. Cheng’s piece takes the form of fifteen diaristic video vignettes that reveal a foreign place through the eyes of an outsider.
The New Museum residency was a partnership with the K11 Art Foundation (KAF), aimed at promoting new works by emerging Chinese artists. In conjunction with the exhibition, the New Museum screened a special seven-hour cut of Cheng’s film In Course of the Miraculous, 2015, edited specially by the artist.