Christine(Cheng) Dong is a Bristol-based visual artist and experimental printmaker whose work engages with systems of logic, constraint, and perception. Referring to herself as a transdisciplinary explorer, she works across graphics, printmaking, writing, and constructed visual systems—often beginning not with an image, but with an idea. Her practice inhabits human-made structures such as mathematics, language, and measurement where rationality prevails. Yet rather than reinforcing these systems, Christine subtly reconfigures them through arbitrary assumptions, invented rules, and visual “validations” that invite contradiction, fiction, and poetic misalignment. Within a world overloaded with knowledge and shielded by rigid logic, she searches for spaces of irrationality and for new ways of seeing.
Informed by the Oulipian embrace of constraint as a creative tool, Christine constructs systems that mimic the rigour of science while allowing space for disorientation and drift.
“I like to make theorems that don’t belong in art at all—to make rules that sound logical but lead to nowhere. They borrow the structure of science, but they’re really about exploring uncertainty, contradiction, and the strange places our minds go when we try to make sense of things.”
In doing so, Christine not only examines how we measure the world but asks why and to what end we rely on such measurements to define our reality.
This interplay of structure and speculation comes into focus in her project (En)cipher, which showcases Christine’s distinctive method of building narrative through rule-based systems. As part of an inquiry into the intrinsic experience of human language, she employed three mathematical operations to alter the structure of English, generating new visual forms. “This repetitive cycle reminded me of encryption,” she notes. “It’s the act of using an alternate logic system to alienate and reconstruct an existing one—forming a new structure altogether.” The resulting work is deliberately unresolved: a series of unpolished drafts, scattered puzzle pieces, and open-ended propositions. As she states “It is a process, not an answer.”
One of the generative systems in (En)cipher responds directly to the materiality of writing. Christine calculated the graphic area of letters and punctuation marks in Futura at 60 pt, then converted English words into circles of equal area. Each circle is further defined by a system of linear equations, transforming written language into a visual code. Viewers are invited to engage with this transformed language—deciphering its structure through the logic of mathematics to experience language as a material in its own right.
This deliberate complexity is central to Christine’s practice. It is not designed to provoke problem-solving or intellectual display, but to invite viewers into an encounter with the layered, interdependent systems that shape perception.
“I believe mystery is born from this. The more we constrain ourselves with logic and rules, the more we uncover the beauty of the irrational.”
Since 2023, Christine has further extended her conceptual investigations into printmaking as a medium. Rather than treating it as a traditional endpoint of image production, she uses print as a generative framework for experimentation with systems, repetition, and transformation. In Act VII, she reimagines etching through a multi-sensory lens: the work evolves from acts of measurement into a playful, chance-based chess game, and ultimately into sound. By translating visual gesture into an auditory experience, the piece explores the immediate, sensory nature of measurement—dislodged from its usual rational frame.
Printmaking, for Christine, is not an end point but a beginning—an inspiring stage within the broader development of her practice. This approach informs her recent project Transit of ?, in which she applies a rule to the unit of light to generate a series of planetary transit images from a single set of films. The project unfolds as an exploration of variability: how many distinct versions of the same event can emerge through different frames of observation. Light shapes what we perceive; the way we observe, in turn, shapes what we accept as real.
Blending visual sequences with conceptual writing, Transit of Ø takes the form of a fictional narrative. Through this layered construction, Christine reimagines a nonlinear event as a speculative system in which measurement, perception, and storytelling converge. The work resists resolution, instead inviting viewers into a shifting field of associations—an echo of Christine’s ongoing interest in how structure can generate meaning without fixing it.
Transit of Ø is currently on view at Kirkby Gallery in Liverpool, as part of the Book Art exhibition Letting in the Light, on display through 8th August 2025. Here, Christine presents a poetic narrative—one in which light, space, and time converge to tell a story that unfolds beyond the limits of logic.
Christine Dong chdong.com / @_naranjad_
