Lydia Cheng is a Chicago based artist and architect best known for vibrant and energetic cityscape paintings.

Originally from Shanghai, Cheng earned her dual degree in Fine Arts and Architecture from Rhode Island School of Design. After 13 years of architecture career, she decided to pursue her passion for fine arts full time. Materials she uses include acrylic on canvas, and pen and ink.

The energy and movement of an urban space is one of Cheng’s core themes. She uses colors inspired by jazz and blues music to tell the story of a city’s structure, rhythm, and flow.

Cheng’s work had been exhibited in multiple galleries around Chicago, including the Chicago Architectural Biennial.

Urban Solitude

Artist Statement

Currently, Cheng is working on a series of urban cityscapes that explore the beauty of architecture through the lens of an immigrant, an expatriate, an outsider. Urban Solitude explore the complex relationship between architecture, human presence, and the search for belonging in an unfamiliar city.

Rooted in my experience as a first-generation immigrant, this body of work reflects on the quiet emotional landscape of navigating a place that is simultaneously captivating and alienating. The city becomes both a physical environment and a psychological space - one where the desire for connection exists alongside an enduring sense of displacement.

Through painterly interpretations of urban landscapes, I examine the tension between the overwhelming scale of architectural infrastructure and the fragile, transient nature of human encounters.

Architecture, in these paintings, is more than a backdrop. It becomes a silent witness to the rhythms of human existence, holding countless individual stories within its collective structure. The contrast between the built environment and the vulnerability of human experience creates a space for contemplation - where beauty and melancholy, intimacy and isolation, permanence and impermanence coexist.

Rather than portraying solitude as loneliness, I am interested in its quieter complexity: the freedom of anonymity, the poetry of fleeting encounters, the gradual process of finding one’s place within an unfamiliar world.

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