Xinyi Cheng

Xinyi Cheng was born in 1989 in Wuhan, China. She trained first in sculpture, earning a BA from the Academy of Arts and Design at Tsinghua University in Beijing in 2012, before shifting toward painting during a multidisciplinary MFA at the Maryland Institute College of Art in Baltimore, completed in 2014. She then took part in the Skowhegan School of Painting and Sculpture residency in 2014, followed by a residency at the Rijksakademie van beeldende kunsten in Amsterdam in the mid-2010s.

She lives and works primarily in Paris, with at least one institutional source describing her as based between Shanghai and Paris. Her paintings are expressive, figurative studies of friends, lovers, and everyday scenes, built around desire, intimacy, and vulnerability, often in close-up and muted color. Her first solo gallery show, The Hands of a Barber, They Give In, opened at Galerie Balice Hertling in Paris in 2017. In 2019 she won the Baloise Art Prize at Art Basel, an award that came with an acquisition of her work by the Baloise Group for the collection of the Nationalgalerie in Berlin. Her first major museum solo, The Horse with Eye Blinders, opened at Hamburger Bahnhof in Berlin at the end of 2020 and ran into 2021, followed by a solo exhibition at Lafayette Anticipations in Paris in 2021.

Cheng's critical profile has built quickly around a small number of high-visibility validations rather than a long institutional track record: the 2019 Baloise Art Prize, her first major museum solo at Hamburger Bahnhof in 2020 to 2021, and a further solo exhibition at Lafayette Anticipations in Paris in 2021. Critics and curators consistently frame her work around intimacy, desire, and emotional vulnerability rendered through close, tender studies of people she knows, often in domestic or private settings. The recurring theme in institutional writing about her is the way her figures carry feeling through color and proximity rather than narrative detail.

Cheng's best-documented auction result is Darling, a 2019 oil on linen that sold at Christie's in November 2021 for USD 300,000, reported at roughly 750 percent over its high estimate. That sale is described as her auction debut. Additional lots have appeared at Phillips in Hong Kong dollars, generally at lower values. Aggregated market-data services have cited a higher, unconfirmed peak figure near USD 560,000 for an unspecified painting, but without a title, sale date, or auction house attached to it, so it cannot be treated as a verified record.

There is no catalogue raisonne for Cheng, which is typical for an artist still early in her career, so provenance is best verified through her representing galleries: Matthew Marks Gallery, Galerie Balice Hertling, and Antenna Space. Her auction history remains thin, with a single well-documented result at USD 300,000 and scattered lower sales, which means any individual auction price should be read as a data point rather than a market trend. Her museum recognition, including the Baloise Art Prize acquisition into the Nationalgalerie collection and back-to-back museum solos in Berlin and Paris, is currently a stronger signal of standing than her auction record alone.