Mid-Autumn Special Edition: Yuheng Deng and “Home”

In this new episode, we invited Yuheng (Peter) Deng to talk about his paintings, which are featured in the UCBRC’s first online art exhibition, Home is…?. Yuheng is a second-year international student at Haverford College and a spiritual artist with unique cultural understandings. In both his artworks and our discussion in this podcast, Yuheng illustrates his transforming perspectives on “home” during this pandemic. We can also discover that the idea of home may have already been transformed into memories and imaginations that are self-constructed. However, through the process of searching for our roots, the unreliableness of our imagination and memories often distort and destabilize the reality.

In his paintings, we can see not only a sense of belongingness and innocence represented by childhood but also the hidden side of contemporary Chinese society. For example, by depicting immigrant workers who moved from rural areas to cities but lived in sub-optimal living conditions, Yuheng tries to reveal concepts of home by looking at different layers of society.