Emily Cheng

Emily Cheng (born 1953) is an American artist of Chinese ancestry. She is best known for large scale paintings with a center focus often employing expansive circular images... "radiantly colored, radially composed".^[1] She has won numerous awards including Pollock-Krasner Foundation Fellowship, 2010, New York Foundation for the Arts Fellowship, 1996, Yaddo Residency, 1995, National Endowment for the Arts Fellowship, 1982–1983.

Painting for me, is the evidence of an inquiry…It is the postulation made physical….It is the wall that penetrates….It is the mind reminded. It is the hunch made vivid. It is the reworking of the familiar. It is the shadow of the unfamiliar. It is the acting out of desire. It is the probe of limits. It is the life imaged. It is the eye engaged. Painting is luxury bounded.^[2]

Cheng received her BFA in 1975 from the Rhode Island School of Design and attended the New York Studio School. Cheng has exhibited widely in the US and in Asia. In 2011, Cheng created Charting Sacred Territories, an exhibition exploring world religions which opened in the Museum of Contemporary Art Taipei, Taiwan (2011)^[3] and traveled to Hanart TZ Gallery in (2015),^[4] Shenzhen Art Museum, Shenzhen, China, (2015)^[5] and in Europe at the Palais Liechtenstein Feldkirch, Austria (2019).

Cheng has had numerous solo shows in the US and in Asia and is represented by Hanart TZ Gallery in Hong Kong.^[6]

In 2007, Timezone 8 published a monograph of Emily Cheng titled, Chasing Clouds, a decade of studies, with essays by Kevin Powers and Johnson Chang ^[3]

Emily Cheng has lived and worked in New York City since 1977 and teaches Asian Art History at the School of Visual Arts^[7]