Ting-Ting Cheng, ‘Reasons to Travel’
‘It’s not about travelling, it’s about finding the place we identify as home’.
‘Reasons to Travel’, as the title suggests, uses the answers people give to explain why they travel and the photos taken in foreign places to explore the meaning of, and the relationship between, travel and home. The project was inspired by the travel experience of the artist herself. As a Taiwanese living in London, Cheng has visited many countries in her life, for work as well as tourism. She became interested in the reasons why people travel and in the relationship between people and places. How does the environment change our mindset, and how do we become transformed by a place where we do not belong while we are travelling? What is the difference between travelling to a completely new place, and travelling back home – to Taiwan or London, say?
The photographs, taken by Cheng while visiting different countries, can be seen as an experiment of existing ‘in the state of travelling’. The text, consisting of quotations from the artist’s friends and drawing on her own ideas, cites multiple reasons for why people travel. Travelling becomes here a process of finding out where the place we identify as our home is, and of figuring out how we identify ourselves on and via our travels.
Cheng’s practice focuses on the relationship between objects, environments and people’s emotions toward them. Using a combination of images and text, she explores how they anchor and relate to each other. Ting-Ting Cheng was born in Taiwan and graduated from the MA Photographic Studies at the University of Westminster, London. She has exhibited and received a number of photography awards internationally, including New York, London, Berlin and Taipei. Cheng’s works are prized by private collectors worldwide.
www.chengtingting.com
