Ron Wan & Mildred Cheng
“Tell them about your rugs,” Wan teases as he gives Cheng a playful nudge in the arm during a recent visit to Sheung Wan co-working space The Hive. It seems Cheng, who moonlights as a painter, has just purchased a tufting gun so she can turn her trippy artworks, some of them bordering on the erotic, into rugs.
“A lot of my personal work is based on psychedelic experiences,” says Cheng, a 27-year-old vegetarian who goes by the alias “I Ride Dolphin” on Instagram. She is simultaneously head-in-the-clouds and sharp-as-a-tack, and received her bachelor’s from the Savannah College of Art and Design (SCAD)’s former campus in Hong Kong in 2017. Despite being relatively new to the field, she has already been commissioned by Zheng Mahler, the Hong Kong-based artist-and-anthropologist duo of Royce Ng and Daisy Bisenieks, to design their book,