New York, NY | Mentor: Irina Rozovsky
Yuhan Cheng is a Chinese photographer and filmmaker based in New York and Chengdu. Working primarily with analog photography, film, and installation, they make autobiographical work about intimacy, migration, gender, family, and the unstable meaning of home.
Cheng processes and prints much of their photographic work in their own darkroom, allowing material qualities such as color shifts, marks, decay, and imperfect exposure to become part of the work. Their practice considers the contradiction between photography’s promise of permanence and the constant transformation of bodies, relationships, and places.
Their photobook Room was published by LinLin Plum in 2025 and launched at Printed Matter in New York. Their work has been presented by FAR–NEAR, FotoFilmic, NOWNESS Asia, Hüten Gallery, and Yellowbox Art Museum. In 2026, Cheng was selected as a PhotoWork Foundation Junior Fellow. They received a BFA in Film from the School of Visual Arts.
“Being a PhotoWork Junior Fellow was the first time I felt recognized and supported by a photography organization in New York. The fellowship gave me a sense of community, greater confidence in my voice, and the momentum to bring my project into a clearer form.”
-Yuhan Cheng | 2026 Junior Fellow
Project Statement
The Feminine Sun is a photographic project about living through transitions before they become
fully visible or understandable.
The project began while I was applying for permanent residency in the United States and beginning
hormone therapy. My legal status, body, relationship to gender, and sense of home were changing at
the same time, but none of those changes felt certain or complete. I later paused my medical
transition, yet the questions that emerged during that period remained: what kinds of lives feel
available to us, what must be left behind in order to enter them, and what happens when a person
stays suspended between several possible futures?
The photographs move between Chengdu and New York, two places that I understand as home but
inhabit differently. In Chengdu, the city sits inside a basin where monsoon brings clouds, fog to
often obscure the sun. When I look upward, at times I only see a pale circle of light behind the
clouds. That invisible but persistent light became a metaphor for a self that is present before it can
be clearly seen.
In New York, another kind of sun appears inside my bedroom darkroom. A pink-red enlarger light
illuminates the room and passes through a photographic negative, transforming an image of the
external world into something physical that I can hold. The light of the Chengdu sky and the
darkroom light in New York form a parallel structure within the work: one is distant and obscured,
while the other is intimate, artificial, and capable of turning the world into my view.
The photographs include self-portraits, family members, friends, beds, windows, curtains, domestic
objects, and the neighborhoods surrounding me. While earlier work often concentrated on the room
as a private enclosure, this project gradually opens outward. In Two Bridges and Chinatown, where
I have lived for several years, I photograph streets, public interiors, and an aging community that
has passed through many seasons of migration and change.
I work primarily with 35mm and medium-format film and process and print much of the work
myself. The physical instability of photography is important to the project. Prints may contain
fingerprints, chemical marks, uneven exposure, shifting color, or areas that resist correction. I
previously understood these qualities mainly as technical failures. I now see them as evidence of
time, touch, impatience, and the conditions under which an image was made.
2026 Junior Fellows: Yuhan Cheng | Brayan Enriquez | Claire Kosky | Jacobb Nichol | Avery Norman | Dahveed Wilkins