Vennes Cheng 鄭秀慧

Scholar & Curator

Dr Vennes Cheng Sau-wai is a scholar and curator based in Hong Kong. She is currently a faculty member of the Division of Arts and Machine Creativity at the Hong Kong University of Science and Technology. Previously, she served as the Associate Curator of Hong Kong Visual Culture at M+ Museum. Her research areas include modern and contemporary art of Hong Kong and China, diaspora studies, artist archives, and historical and mnemonic contingency. Cheng was a research fellow in the joint fellowship programme of the Goethe-Institut, documenta Institut, and documenta Archiv in 2021. In 2018, she was selected as one of Para Site Hong Kong's emerging art professionals. Her research paper on ‘the visual resonance of Hong Kong in 1997 and now’ received honourable mention of the International Association for Visual Culture and the Journal of Visual Culture’s 2023 Early Career Researcher Prize in 2023.  Her curatorial projects have been realised in Hong Kong, Taiwan, Germany and Thailand.

Cheng received her PhD in Art History from The Chinese University of Hong Kong in 2021 and her MA in Cultural Studies from Goldsmiths, University of London in 2016. Her monograph Archive as Detour, which examines archival art practices and artist archives in contemporary Hong Kong, was published in 2024.