RoundSky Paintings 2002-2015

APT artist Emily Cheng is presenting a solo show at the Shenzhen Art Museum. It is a 12 year survey, with over 200 works in 5 rooms from September 2015.

About the artist work:

Cheng’s art has revitalized the value of universalism that lies at the core of modernism, yet it is neither about the autonomy of art nor the ambitious internationalism of postwar modernists. Her project, spanning three decades, embraces the legacy of spiritual art worldwide, cutting across disparate cultural histories for constituents of iconographic language, analyzing its vocabulary and syntax while avoiding the trap of symbolic meaning. Like the Chinese ideographic character-word. Cheng’s iconic imageries bring out the universal in the culturally specific through the power of visual presence. Most importantly, with her own creative work, Cheng demonstrates the possibility for a new spiritual painting, an art that seeks to ground our spiritual being in the physical, and to create a universal sensibility within time-tried imagery—an act of faith that both confronts and ameliorates the world of image fatigue we live in today.

--Johnson Chang, Curator and Gallerist, Hanart TZ Gallery.

In Cheng’s paintings, all religions are given equal weight and treated objectively. As a result, the works convey a sense of universality, reflecting the shared human desire throughout history for a structured belief system. This exploration is characteristic of Cheng’s work, which seeks both commonalities and areas where beliefs, customs, and imagery diverge. As Cheng notes, “I would like to take the conscious viewer through the body, out into the world, into the universe—to something larger than the self - perhaps a challenge to be greater than we are.”

--Barbara Bloemink Curator and Art Consultant, Former Director of Cooper Hewitt Museum, Guggenheim Museum, Las Vegas and Hermitage, National Design Museum and Contemporary Art Centre of Virginia. Excerpted from RoundSky Preface.

At times, Cheng’s art—despite its color and joy—can be seen as an expression of existential despair the realization that there is nothing redemptive, nothing transcendent. One cannot resurrect religion or chivalry, this pictorial inventory seems to say; one can only adjust to the emptiness left by its demise. Yet the void can be compelling, silently urging us on, convinced that because there is ultimately nothing, we must do something, and as much as we possibly can. There is a realm, within the power of our own making, that can yield order, beauty, and meaning. Only for now, it is true; but now is all we will ever have.

--Richard Vine, Senior Editor, Art in America. Excerpted from Beyond the Postmodern Dilemma.

Emily Cheng’s paintings are like nobody else’s, but they have symbolist and Surrealist precedents. But her grounds, however luminous or diaphanously glazed, are often a uniform surface with no beginning or end, as solid and close as infinity. I am reminded of the medieval anachronic relationship to space, which continued to contest the temporal linearity of orthogonal space even into the early Renaissance... If there is one thing that Cheng's paintings seem to be consistently “about” it is this stepping beyond the perceptual threshold of normative orthogonal relations moving along Times arrow and into realms where constative images. or Signs. are activated into performative entities. From this vantage point we can even look back upon the world we thought we knew, but which is now itself activated into various iterations of living symbols.

--Stephen Westfall, Artist. Contributor to Art in America, Chair of Rutgers Painting Department, Rutger’s University.

Excerpted from A Pilgrim’s Pan-Theistic Progress.