Zhiwan Cheung: Artist in Residence in the Milwaukee River Greenway
July 20, 2025 | Topics: featured artist
The Natural Realm presents Zhiwan Cheung, who is among 10 artists participating in a year-long residency program called ARTservancy, now in its sixth year. ARTservancy is a collaboration between Gallery 224 in Port Washington and the Restoring Lands Land Trust, (formerly Ozaukee Washington Land Trust and River Revitalization Foundation). Milwaukee Area Land Conservancy, Tall Pines Conservancy, and Lake Michigan Bird Observatory. The mission of ARTservancy is to promote the visionary work of both the artists and conservationists. Each artist has selected a preserve to spend time in and to engage with.
Reflections from the Artist
During my ARTservancy residency, I’ve spent time walking in the Milwaukee River Greenway, beginning with a visit to Restoring Lands (formerly the River Revitalization Foundation) to learn about the trail’s layered history. My project focuses on 3D scanning the landscape to capture these conservation sites and situate them within surreal digital environments. Such spaces can exist in multiple, concurrent forms.
Working with fragmented narratives, I explore how the histories embedded in the land shift in meaning and context. This approach mirrors the ever-changing landscape of the Milwaukee River Greenway and the broader Milwaukee area. By reimagining physical sites in a digital realm, I aim to create a dialogue between preservation and transformation.
This work builds on my background as a video artist, where I engage with storytelling and mythologies through technologically mediated, time-based art. In my recent project, 18th Wenyuan Street, I scanned my grandparents’ former home in Guangzhou, China—now replaced by an elementary school—and constructed a virtual environment from those scans. That digital space became a vessel for memory, representing a place that no longer exists. It raised critical questions about history, loss, and placemaking in the digital age.
For the ARTservancy residency, I will create multi-channel video installations and still imagery that merge digital data with classical storytelling forms. By examining our relationship to landscape, myth, and belief, I aim to generate new, open-ended narratives. As science fiction writer Ken Liu suggests, stories tether us to places and help us give meaning to abstract ideas like “homeland.” This project seeks to extend that tether into both physical and digital terrains.
Gallery of Works
Bio
I first got a taste of performing in front of a camera as a book reviewer for Reading Rainbow, the 1990s television show advocating reading for children. Since then, I have continued to probe the intersection of national identity and the personal psyche, focusing on how and where they join and diverge. Capturing the language of a person and place is complex, often unclear, and constantly shifting. Within these unstable grounds, I seek both the real and mythological, guided by an allusive visual language that may lead to a rite of passage.
I received my BFA from Cornell University and my MFA from Carnegie Mellon University. I have exhibited work nationally and internationally in venues such as NURTUREart Gallery in New York, Pica Pica Gallery in Berlin, and The Andy Warhol Museum in Pittsburgh.
This residency is sponsored by Restoring Lands land trust. For more information about the Milwaukee River Greenway go to our Find-a-Park page.
Related stories (ARTservancy artists in residence in the Greenway):
Additional ARTservancy artists in residence at other sites can be found here.
This is the latest in our series of featured artists, which is intended to showcase the work of photographers, artists, writers and other creative individuals in our community whose subjects or themes relate in some broad sense to nature, urban nature, people in nature, etc. To see a list of previously featured artists, click here. The work of the 2022-2023 ARTservancy artists in residence is currently being exhibited monthly at Gallery 224. To meet the other ARTservancy artists in residence, click here and then use the drop-down menu.
All images courtesy of the artist, except as noted. The featured photo at the top of Zhiwan Cheung in the Milwaukee River Greenway is by Eddee Daniel. Restoring Lands is a project partner of A Wealth of Nature.
About Preserve Our Parks
Preserve Our Parks, Inc. is an independent nonprofit organization dedicated to the preservation of parks and green spaces. Our mission: To advocate for and promote Milwaukee area parks and open spaces and to strive to protect the tenets of Wisconsin’s Public Trust Doctrine.
For more than 25 years, we have been a leader in advocating for the protection of Milwaukee County park lands, halting many proposals to develop, privatize, or sell local parkland and lakefront spaces. More information about POP, including past accomplishments, is available at www.preserveourparks.org.