With digital perfection increasingly overshadowing human vulnerability, London-based artist Mo Cheng creates visual narratives that embrace the poetry of imperfection. Working across experimental video and multimedia installation, Mo explores the tension between mechanical precision and emotional expression, crafting meditative spaces where failure becomes a quiet form of resistance. Originally from Hubei, China, Mo draws from her background in interaction design and digital media art to examine how systems—both technological and interpersonal—shape perception and affect the way relationships unfold.
In her 2022 video work Mistakes, Mo Cheng stages a ritual of malfunction across three measured chapters, where gestures loop, glitch, and unravel under mechanical pressure. At its core is the repeated calligraphic phrase (“useless”), drawn from Zhuangzi’s notion that what es capes function holds its own kind of value. Juxtaposing robotic precision with imperfect brushstrokes, Mo reclaims error as an aesthetic and philosophical form—one that resists automation’s demand for seamlessness.
Structured in three chapters—Change, Standard, and Truth—Mistakes maps a progression from mechanical repetition to conceptual instability. In Change, a robotic arm repeats the same gesture with cold precision, accompanied by intensifying electronic pulses that mimic accelerated learning. Standard collapses under glitch aesthetics, as the boundaries between error and correctness begin to blur. In Truth, ambient sounds such as birdsong and wind interrupt sterile visuals, suggesting that the erasure of error may invite a deeper kind of disorder. Though the work’s single-screen format and structural repetition risk stasis, these constraints mirror the systems it interrogates—closed, controlled, and resistant to deviation.
Exploring the emotional mechanics of control and care through gesture and sound, Mo Cheng continues her investigation into failure and fragility with Strings (2023), an interactive installation built around a modified piano. Recently featured in a group exhibition of emerging artists in London, the work exemplifies her inquiry into systems of relational tension. Rooted in her interest in how systems reflect human dynamics, Mo transforms the familiar instrument into something more intimate—less an object of performance, more a vessel for listening, tension, and response. The piano becomes a stand-in for the relational body, one that remembers every touch and resists both force and absence.
Participants are invited not to perform, but to engage. Sound emerges not from melody but from pressure—too much and the strings stretch to breaking; too little and they fall slack, refusing to speak. This sensitive threshold echoes the emotional conditions of closeness, where intention can be misread, and presence must be constantly negotiated. The installation is reflected upon Susan Forward’s writings on emotional blackmail by making pressures that operate beneath the surface of care audible, including fear, obligation and guilt. Mo emphasises what often remains invisible in human relationships—hesitation, overreach, withdrawal—letting these tensions resonate rather than resolve.
Mo Cheng’s practice resists finality. Her works do not aim to resolve tension or translate experience into fixed meaning. Instead, they hold space for uncertainty, for pressure that does not resolve but continues to shape perception. In both Mistakes and Strings, structure is held as suspended presence rather than imposed explanation. Mo Cheng’s work moves forward not by closure, but by remaining open to contradiction.
