Cherry Cheng’s Notting Hill Flat Reveals a Collector Guided by Instinct
Cherry Cheng’s London home does not read like a polished display case. It feels closer to a private argument about taste — one shaped by scent, theory, friendship, and a sharp tolerance for wit. The founder of Jouissance Perfumes has assembled a collection that privileges works she can live with, not simply admire from a distance.
Cheng, who grew up in Beijing, came to the art world by a circuitous route. She attended Kimball Union Academy in New England, where she became aware that she did not share the same cultural background as many of her peers. Rather than retreat from that difference, she moved toward art with unusual discipline. She studied in London, then completed a master’s at Sotheby’s Institute before studying at Goldsmiths from 2022 to 2024. Along the way, she worked with art advisor Daniel Malarkey and at Gurr Johns, experiences that helped refine an eye already trained by looking and reading.
That eye now shapes a collection built largely through friendships and regular gallery visits. Cheng is a member of the Serpentine Young Collectors, and her flat includes works by Daiga Grantina, Nat Faulkner, Linder, Araki Nobuyoshi, Chechu Alava, Graham Wiebe, Alma Berrow, and others. She acquired Grantina’s work from Emalin and Faulkner’s from Brunette Coleman. The mix is deliberately loose in spirit: collage, drawing, ceramics, photography, and small sculptural objects sit together without forcing a single thesis.
What binds them is a sensibility Cheng describes in practical terms. An artwork must be pleasing, she says, and it has to speak to her. Sometimes that means beauty. Sometimes intimacy. Sometimes a joke. The humor in her collection is often sly rather than broad — a boxing-glove shoe, a ceramic cake, a fork that tilts toward absurdity without losing elegance.
The overlap with her fragrance practice is hard to miss. Cheng founded Jouissance in May 2022 to explore scent, literature, and female desire, and the company now sits neatly within the broader appetite for literary-inflected luxury. Yet she says she does not normally wear perfume herself, because it would be too confusing to her senses. She prefers to work with scent at a remove, much as she prefers to encounter art through theory and looking rather than making.
Daily ballet, which she has practiced for four years, gives that sensibility a physical discipline. It is, she says, a way to focus what she calls her fire. In Cheng’s world, collecting is not about accumulation for its own sake. It is a form of attention — one that links the body, the shelf, and the imagination.
