Cherry Cheng’s Notting Hill flat reads like a shelf-by-shelf diary. On the top of one bookcase, there’s a painting by Beau Gabriel; on the row below, a glass work by Miranda Keyes alongside pieces by Sarah Pucci and Juliette Teste; below them, an Araki Nobuyoshi Polaroid leans into a Katrien de Blauwer collage; below that, a Lucile Littot ceramic candle holder. Step left, and you’ll find a Leo Costelloe fork laced with hair, two Sebastian Espejo still lifes, and a Joline Kwakkenbos portrait. Look up: Christopher Le Brun’s September Two (2023). Look across and you’ll find a Linder collage. In the mirror’s reflection, a Sang Woo Kim. Even Cheng’s cat, Pookie, has been painted into the household—a portrait by Joseph Jones sits on a shelf beside a ceramic cake by Shafei Xia.
This is the everyday Cheng has assembled around herself. Collector, perfumer, dancer, and founder of the boutique fragrance house Jouissance Perfumes, she is the first to point out that none of it was strategic. “I am a member of the Serpentine Young Collectors, and a lot of my collection is made up of works by my friends,” she said.
Scent, space, and sensibility
We met over Earl Grey in Marylebone. Cheng came from her daily ballet class—she has been practicing for four years; it’s a discipline that helps focus what she will later describe (Aries Sun, Cancer Moon, Scorpio rising) as “her fire.” I leaned in to greet her and noticed something unexpected: She was not wearing perfume. In fact, she smelled faintly of soap. “I don’t normally wear perfume,” she laughed. “I work with it, but if I wore it every day, it would be too confusing to my senses.”
Indeed, Cheng noted that she tends “to respond to the ephemeral qualities” of things.
She added: “When I am choosing art, I need to check in with myself: is it pleasing—can I live with it?” Then, more simply: “It has to speak to me.”
Sometimes, that means beauty, sometimes intimacy, sometimes a joke. “Sometimes I like it to just be funny—to provoke that kind of response in me,” she added. The boxing-glove shoes by Women's History Museum, Xia’s ceramic cake, Costelloe’s fork: the humor here is sly.
From Beijing to London
Cheng did not start off as an art world insider. She grew up in Beijing and attended Kimball Union Academy, a boarding school in New England, where she “was aware that I did not have the same culture as my peers.”
Rather than shrink from that gap, she set out to close it with characteristic courage. The route she chose was photography. As an undergraduate in London, she shot pictures and read about them, and somewhere in the middle of that, she stopped wanting to make them. “It was during my undergrad that I recognized that I preferred to experience art through theory and looking rather than making,” she noted. The Araki Polaroid on her shelf is from that period—one of her earliest purchases, and still one she holds onto. “When I started out, I used to experience these photographs so personally—it was as though they spoke just to me,” she recalled.
A master’s at Sotheby’s Institute came next. Cheng paused to reflect: “Everyone was so beautifully dressed.” Then, Goldsmiths from 2022 to 2024, where her eye for contemporary work really focused. In May 2022, she founded Jouissance, a fragrance house exploring scent, literature, and female desire. Revealing remarkable prescience, the company is currently riding the “literary chic” wave that Vogue hailed as one of the trends of 2026, fusing perfume, longing, and literature.
Jouissance feels like an experimental artwork in its own right, and the same set of preoccupations occasionally shows up on her shelves: a Linder collage cutting up the female body; a Namio Harukawa drawing; or a portrait by Chechu Alava. She spoke warmly about feminist work from the 1970s and is drawn, in contemporary art, to work that feels “pure, not anchored in some political moment.”
Collecting by instinct
Cheng worked alongside the art advisor Daniel Malarkey and at the advisory firm Gurr Johns, and she now navigates openings and studio visits with ease. When she chooses an artwork for her collection, it’s a personal choice. She regularly visits two London tastemaking galleries, Emalin and Brunette Coleman. From Emalin, she acquired a work by Daiga Grantina; from Brunette Coleman, Nat Faulkner’s glass ampoule filled with the sleep aid Nytol.
She was recently thrilled to learn that the Grantina work is heading to a show at the Mead Art Museum in Massachusetts. “What I find validating is when the works I have chosen are included in the collections of individuals or institutions that I admire.”
For someone who jokes about feeling old after a recent very small birthday, there is a sense that Cheng is just at the start of her next chapter. In October, she will move to Paris to study at ISIPCA, the prestigious perfume school.
Apartment hunting is already underway, and she is relieved that so many places are cat-friendly. “I am taking Pookie with me,” she said. With Paris’s art scene intensifying, this next phase will likely bring even more panache. Perhaps Pookie, too, will learn a little French.
