By Isla Ye
When perception resists resolution, and meaning fails to take a stable form, uncertainty becomes more than a condition—it becomes the material through which thought begins. It is within this space that artist Mo Cheng situates her work, examining how knowledge is shaped not by certainty, but by delay, speculation, and the limits of recognition.
Mo’s 2022 experimental film Mistakes gained wider visibility through its inclusion in Stay with Murmur, a group exhibition at A Space Gallery in New York in July 2025. Structured in three parts—Change, Standard, and Truth—the piece stages a ritual of collapse: a robotic arm executes repeated calligraphic gestures while distortion intensifies across sound and image. The word “useless”, drawn from Zhuangzi, recurs throughout—not as a gesture of futility, but as a quiet claim for the generative potential of non-functionality. Avoiding spectacle, Mo instead crafts a sustained pressure on system, form, and rhythm, allowing failure to unfold not as breakdown but as process.
This conceptual tension carries forward into Babel Experiment, an experimental video developed in 2024 and screened in Fragmented Wholeness at 16art8 Gallery in Düsseldorf. Here, the focus shifts from mechanical repetition to linguistic opacity. Loosely referencing the Tower of Babel, the work centers on a scenario in which participants reach into a constructed “Touch and Feel Box” and attempt to describe what they sense without seeing it. Their responses—partial, speculative, and often contradictory—are recorded and layered into a densely composed video and soundscape. Babel Experiment does not aim to identify or reveal the object in question. Instead, it captures the conditions under which recognition falters and interpretation begins. Language functions here not as a clarifying force, but as a porous surface where doubt circulates and understanding is deferred.
Photo Courtesy: Sara Smith (Mo Cheng, Babel Experiment, 2024)
Rather than offering closure, the work sustains a speculative mode of engagement. Gestures become open-ended inquiries; speech remains suspended as trace. Mo invites the viewer into a space of interpretive presence, where the absence of visual certainty is not a lack, but a structural condition. Perception becomes less about resolution than about staying with the indeterminate.
Photo Courtesy: Mo Cheng (Mo Cheng, Babel Experiment, 2024)
While Mistakes explores system breakdown, Babel Experiment inhabits ambiguity. The gestures accumulate, the meanings drift. There is no anchor. Mo doesn’t close her structures—she holds them open, letting the viewer enter not as observer, but as participant in a shared unknowing. In one such moment, a hesitant voice emerges from within the box. It does not name the object; it registers the effort to name. What Mo captures is not resolution, but the labor of sense-making—the moment where sensation turns, imperfectly, toward meaning.
Mo’s practice invites a reconsideration of perceptual authority and the terms of aesthetic resolution. Rather than assert clarity, she creates spaces where meaning remains open-ended and the desire to apprehend is acknowledged but not fulfilled. Meaning does not arrive fully formed. It unfolds slowly in the suspended interval between sensing and knowing.
