| Amy Cheng | |
| Birth Place: | Kaohsiung City, Taiwan |
| Nationality: | Taiwanese-American |
| Education: | University of Texas at Austin (BFA) Hunter College (MFA) |
| Website: | https://www.amychengstudio.com |
| Birth Date: | December 8, 1956 |
| Style: | Studio art |
Amy Cheng (born December 8, 1956) is a Taiwanese-American artist with a dual career in studio art and 2-dimensional public art fabricated in a variety of materials, such as mosaic, laminated glass, tiles,[1] and terrazzo. Cheng's work is characterized by its complexity Using the dichotomies of light and dark, soft and hard edge, and contrast of micro and macro.
Amy Cheng was born in Kaohsiung City, Taiwan. Her family immigrated to Brazil in 1961, first to Sapucaia, a village in Rio Grande do Sul, then to São Paulo, S.P. In 1967 her family moved from Brazil to Oklahoma City, OK, and, in 1969 to Dallas, TX.[2] [3] She received a Bachelor of Fine Arts (BFA) in painting from the University Texas at Austin (1978) and a M.F.A. in painting from Hunter College, City University of New York (1982). Cheng lived in New York City from 1978 to 1989 when she moved to Tivoli, in New York's Mid-Hudson Valley, and in 1997 to New Paltz, NY. In 2019, she moved back to New York City. In 2020 she retired from teaching. She lives in New York City and maintains a studio in the South Bronx.
In 2019, on a sabbatical, Cheng spent three months as Artist-in-Residence at the Carter Burden Covello Center[4] in Manhattan. By the close of her stay Cheng had moved away from making large oil paintings on canvas to making small gouache and oil marker paintings. Cheng moved into a series of geometric abstractions that explored deeper layered space while retaining the pattern and repetition she has used consistently throughout her painting career. At the new reduced scale, the fine marker line hatching, and crosshatching turned the patterning and repetition into a sense of texture. These artworks are characterized by intricacy, layering, referential abstraction, geometry, dynamic space, pattern and repetition. In 2023 Cheng began to invent a visual vocabulary to paint imaginative visual speculations on the mysteries of the universe at the macro and micro levels. Cheng overtly, if playfully, references contem porary concepts of astrophysics and quantum mechanics.[5]
In 2009, Cheng spent six months in Brazil on a Fulbright Senior Lecture/Research grant as a Visiting Professor in the Graduate Painting Program of São Paulo University, S.P., Brazil. This was the first time she returned to Brazil since leaving as a child. She proposed to study Brazilian folk art, but found herself more drawn to the tropical Brazilian flora.[6] When she returned to the U.S. worked as an Artist-in-Residence at the McColl Center for the Arts in Charlotte, NC.[7] It was at the Center that Cheng began a series of paintings that led directly to the Mandala Series that occupied her for the decade of the 2010’s. The Mandala oil paintings ranged from 30 x 30-in to 62 x 90-in used a base composition of two overlapping spheres or, more often, a central sphere symmetrically overlapping two touching spheres.[8] The poet Mark Sullivan wrote in a catalog essay that “[Cheng] immersed herself in the ethic of a nearly impersonal and meditative form of creation … the paintings’ decorative forms […] accentuate the sensation that we are gazing at vibrant imaginary worlds, almost visionary in their flashes of chromatic patterning.”[9]
In the mid-1980s, starting with a single pear in a painted frame, Cheng began work on a series of monumental fruit paintings that lasted a decade.[10] [11] In 1987 one of the framed pear paintings was included in a group exhibition titled "Singular Objects" at Art in General in New York City. The show was reviewed by Ellen Handy in Arts Magazine. Cheng's painting, "Medieval Pear" was singled out by Handy, for notice.[12] In 1989 Cheng was included in "Radiant Fruit: Iconic Still Life" curated by Suzaan Boettger at Trabia Gallery in New York City. The monumental fruit paintings come across more as portraits than still life, a quality Cheng attributes to her Asian sensibility. The Chinese do not present fruits as comestibles on a table; rather they carry symbolic meaning that refers back to nature.[13]
By 1988 Cheng's paintings had moved beyond single fruits to clusters of monumental fruits set in a landscape space.[14] [15] Cheng had her first solo exhibition at The Harrison Gallery, Boca Raton, FL in 1991, and her first solo exhibition in New York City at the C&A Gallery in Soho in 1992. The repetition, patterning, and ornamentation that had until then been relegated to the painted frames that enclosed the single pears were fully overlapping the fruits themselves by the mid-1990s; the patterns were either painted or silk-screened on, and eventually became more pronounced than the underlying fruit. In 1997 moved in a new direction, producing a body of work that introduced a new abstract, if referential, vocabulary of geometry, layering, complexity, and cosmic or skyscapes. Abstraction allowed Cheng to take full advantage of her love of pattern, repetition, and ornamentation.[16] In 1996 she curated a group show of work by Asian American artists at the Eighth Floor Gallery in Soho called Repetition Compulsion, based on what she saw as their common reliance on and use of patterning in their work.[17] The new series of paintings referenced the cosmos.
Two books, Alchemy and Mysticism by Alexander Roob and a paperback on Chinese Folk Art became sources for a series of paintings spanning the 2000s that addressed Cheng's interest in the mysticism that engendered by alchemical notions in the West, and the prevalent beliefs and superstitions that held such strong, long-term sway in China.
Cheng has had solo exhibitions at the Plattsburgh State Art Museum,[18] the Turchin Center for Visual Arts,[19] the Voelker Orth Museum, Tower Fine Art Gallery, SUNY at Brockport, The Marist College Art Gallery, NYC's Equity Gallery, and more. She has been in group exhibitions at Amy Simon Fine Art Gallery, Samuel Dorsky Museum of Art, New Jersey State Museum, Dorsky Gallery Curatorial Projects, Visual Arts Center of New Jersey, Mary Tomás Gallery, William Havu Gallery, and others.
Cheng has 20 years of experience working in public art. She has consistently used a visual vocabulary that includes layers, geometry, pattern, repetition, and ornamentation. The public projects at times include figuration or representation, but they are mostly abstract but referential. The impact of her work comes from the color, use of materials, ornamentation, use of patterning and repetition, elegance, a balance of stillness and movement, and an energetic sense of joy. Many of her commissions are sited at public transport hubs such as airports, subways, bus terminals, bus or streetcar shelters. She has an interest in large, timeless and essential, sometimes cosmic themes. Her award winning projects embrace a variety of media and include:
Cheng is a Professor Emerita of the Art Department, State University of New York at New Paltz. She was a Full Professor from 2004–2020, Associate Professor from 1999–2004, Assistant Professor from 1997–1999.[45] Cheng was an Assistant Professor at Bard College, 1989–1997, a Lecturer in the Visual Arts Program, Princeton University in 1989.
In 2017 after returning from her Fulbright semester in China, Cheng contributed a chapter, "Learning to See: A Fulbright Semester Teaching Painting in Beijing," NARRATIVE INQUIRIES FROM FULBRIGHT LECTURERS IN CHINA: Cross-Cultural Connections in Higher Education, published by Routledge.[46]
In 1999 Cheng co-chaired with Patricia Phillips, then Dean of the School of Fine and Performing Arts, SUNY New Paltz an ARTS NOW Conference on art and audience titled "ooh, ah…oh! Art Audience Response."[47]
PUBLIC ART