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Hanart TZ Gallery
401, Pedder Building
12 Pedder Street
Central, Hong Kong   map * 
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Meanders and Morphosis : Charting the Nature of Interior Spaces
by Hanart TZ Gallery
Location: Hanart TZ Gallery
Artist(s): Emily CHENG
Date: 8 Jul - 30 Jul 2011

Hanart TZ Gallery is proud to present American-Chinese artist Emily Cheng in “Meanders and Morphosis : Charting the Nature of Interior Spaces”. For more than a decade, Emily Cheng has made the study of early paintings her regular artistic exercise. She takes a peculiar sideward glance at artworks, focusing on ornamental details and certain “background” designs and picking up gems overlooked by the master narrative. These images come with strange memories of their former habitats: now having had their focal centers (figure or narrative scenery) hollowed out, they become free abstract radicals, yet they work admirably well when organically multiplied or connected. When adapted to the artist’s larger works, they cohere happily around a dominant structure – usually converging toward the center – bringing about a powerful effect of meditative or hallucinatory focus.

Emily is interested in the space between the subtle body, soul and mind. In this group of paintings, she uses nature as seen through culture to express various relationships to the center. Sometimes this core seems to unravel meandering vines, whirling clouds, or blowing leaves. Other times the center remains faint and still, unperturbed by the activity around it like a Buddhist lohan. Cheng’s vocabulary is predominantly, but not exclusively, Chinese and also European. According to the humanist Renaissance notion of “design”, the glory of it is one’s ability to recognize all things in the world and establish a world that rivals Nature in his mind (“spiritual forms”). A work of art should therefore be a “design” that creates as Nature does, through articulating ideas keeping apace with Nature. The images that are accessories to the central figurative icons which catch Cheng’s eye: the floral patterns and cloud forms are not mere patterns, but rather messages that allude to a higher spiritual scheme.

The nucleus remains the heart of the painting offering us a visual guide or map with which to recalibrate ourselves, in the midst of lush and morphing surroundings.

Emily Cheng was born in New York City and grew up in New Jersey. She graduated from the Rhode Island School of Design, Providence, with a BFA in Painting and in 1975, she furthered her studies with the New York Studio School of Painting, Drawing and Sculpture, New York. The artist was awarded the Pollock-Krasner Foundation Grant in 2010, New York Foundation for the Arts Fellowship in 1996, Yaddo Fellowship in 1995 and National Endowment for the Arts Fellowship in 1983. Emily now lives and works in New York.

Another solo exhibition of Emily Cheng “Charting Sacred Territories : Holy Morphosis” is opening at Museum of Contemporary Art Taipei on 17 June 2011 which will be running until 17 July 2011.

Artists Reception at Hanart TZ Gallery on Friday, 8 July 2011 from 6pm to 8pm.
Exhibition until 30 July 2011.

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