Amy Cheng, Untitled 2019-24, 2019, gouache and marker on paper, 9 x 12.5″
This week we welcome Amy Cheng. Cheng was born in Taiwan and raised in Brazil, Oklahoma and Texas. She received a BFA from the University of Texas at Austin, and an MFA from Hunter College, City University of New York. She has exhibited her paintings nationally and internationally. She has completed a dozen public art commissions including projects at the Seattle-Tacoma International Airport, the Howard St. El Station, Chicago and the 25th Avenue Subway Station, Brooklyn. She received a Fulbright Teaching Fellowship to Renmin University of China, Beijing, PRC in Spring 2017; a P.S.122 Painting Center Fellowship in New York City for a 10-month residency in 2011-12 and a Senior Lecturer/Research Fulbright fellowship to Brazil in Fall 2008. She has been awarded two New York Foundation for the Arts Painting Fellowships, and an Arts International travel grant to China. She is a Professor Emerita at the State University of New York at New Paltz.
Amy Cheng, Untitled 2019-26, 2019, gouache and marker on paper, 6 x 9″
“Albert Einstein said that time is an illusion. According to him the distinction between past, present, and future is only a persistent illusion; that in actual fact, everything that has happened or will happen is always occurring right now, at the same time, in the present.
Amy Cheng, Untitled 2021-1, 2021, gouache and oil marker on paper, 9 x 11″
My current work — a series of patterned, geometric, abstract gouache and oil marker drawings — speak to the disruptive, surprising, and unpredictable aspects of time, and to the fact that we are always in transition. Each drawing contains a singular world with an internal sense of logic. These worlds contain flatness and space, solids and voids, light and color, emptiness and mass. There is movement, things are in transition, and yet there is stillness.
Amy Cheng, Squaring the Circle, 2014, oil on canvas, 62 x 90″
My friend, the artist Thomas Mills, says the works have a hypnotic quality, and that if you “think of memory as being in the future … then these artworks are involved in some way with aspirational memory.” I don’t claim to understand what he means, but it pleases me that he calls me a mystic who makes contemporary, contemplative art that are also ancient…”
