Ching Ho Cheng: The Five Elements at Shepherd Gallery
April 7th through May 9th, 2015
58 East 79th Street (between Madison and Park avenues)
New York, 212 861 4050

Likely the first American artist to prominently feature the selfie, Tseng Kwong Chi has already become an important figure in the history of contemporary American photography and performance history, even though he died of AIDS in 1990. His work is on view at New York University’s Grey Art Gallery. And Ching Ho Cheng, not quite as well known in New York art circles, deserves equal status and recognition for his remarkable psychedelic paintings and torn-paper collages, which maintain a startling contemporaneity — this despite the fact that Cheng, too, died during the AIDS crisis in 1989. His work is currently being shown at Shepherd Gallery, on the Upper East Side.

The two shows demonstrate the fact that, early on, the art of Chinese expatriates in New York was not fully recognized, but this failure was not because of a lack of accomplishment. Indeed, Tseng and Cheng formed a nucleus of a small, but remarkable group of Chinese artists working here during the 1980s, including sculptor Ming Fay and multimedia artist and author Mary Ting. Their activities, begun well before the mania for Chinese art arrived, reflected the budding realities of being an Asian artist in the city’s varied cultural context.

Of the two, Tseng has received the most publicity as an originating participant among the Asian-American avant-garde. He also successfully connected with the downtown scene in the 1980s, becoming a close friend of graffiti artist Keith Haring. His black-and-white photographic art, in which he poses in a Mao suit alongside bohemian comrades or the world’s wonders, is a much a performance event as it is a documentary record.

In New York, New York (Brooklyn Bridge) (1979), Tseng offers a startlingly forceful image: he is seen jumping straight up into the air, towering over the graceful if slightly worn lines of the Brooklyn Bridge, one of the great icons of New York City. As usual, Tseng wears his Mao jacket and dark sunglasses, His left hand, clenched into a fist, is raised high above the bridge — or so it seems, given the low perspective he uses in shooting the photograph. At the same time, he holds in his right hand the shutter-release cable that enables him to photograph himself.

As a picture, New York, New York (Brooklyn Bridge) is a visionary romance invoking the city and bridge, but it also announces the extent of Tseng’s ambition. It is clear here, and in Hollywood Hills, California (1979), in which the artist assumes a smart pose, looking upward on the left and wearing reflective sunglasses, with the famous Hollywood Sign in the background at right. Not only was Tseng posing as a prophetic tourist, he also was asserting the right of a Chinese immigrant to participate in the exclusive, fully American rite of passage through the appropriation of historical icons.

The situation for Cheng is comparable, but also different. In the late 1960s, he made psychedelic paintings: highly detailed and patterned works that feel like suspended music, more or less inspired by the great rock melodies, and the great guitar solos, of the period. One work in gouache and ink on rag board, Queenie Study (1968), feels like a spiral slowing moving downward, away from the viewer. The descent is accomplished through circles of red and black bands — dotted with myriad spermatozoa — which ring more and more tightly as the imagery moves toward the center of the composition.

One untitled work from 1987 consists of torn rag paper colored with iron oxide. A leaf-like piece of torn paper, coppery and regularly dotted with depressions that resemble craters, is placed upon another copper-colored sheet whose angle of placement can only be seen at the bottom of the composition. Cheng commits himself to imagery of more or less uncontestable beauty.

Cheng’s determination to create something memorable, even something exquisite, resonates in profound ways. An untitled canvas from 1988, created with iron and copper oxide, as well as acrylic paint, is stunning in its range of colors from gray to black to a fiery copper hue. On the upper left is a black egg-shape, done with acrylic; it balances the differing background colors, which are not directly legible as imagery.

A much earlier work, from 1979, is a very subtle study of a window’s shadow on the wall. Painted with gouache, it marvelously suggests impermanence. The windowpanes are rendered as being on an angle, with a single band or bar separating the two sheets of glass. The band and background are painted a gray-blue, and as a study, the painting is wonderfully satisfying, a kind of image we often see and remark upon, but never capture because of the mercurial nature of daylight shadows.

If Tseng and Cheng were merely pioneers as Chinese artists during a time of remarkable cultural change, their work would be less valuable even as it documented, both abstractly and figuratively, the spirit of that time. But these artists are highly intelligent; moreover, they are technically accomplished in their chosen mediums. Tseng’s photos are memorable in formal terms, just as Cheng’s paintings and torn-paper collages remain in the thoughts of his viewers at least partially for their excellent execution. One hopes that the lives of these two men will remain secondary in interest when the actual works are looked at and read for what they are: sophisticated artworks that hold the viewer’s attention.

In fact, Muna Tseng, sister of the artist, has remarked that writers may focus “too much” on her brother’s death; the same might be true of Cheng as well. This makes sense, as death played no role in her brother’s art, or in Cheng’s. Both men celebrated life. Tragically, both men were stricken young. That doesn’t mean, however, that their work is immature, or that they produced only small bodies of work. Now, Tseng and Cheng are carefully presented to the public by their sisters (Muna and Sybao Cheng-Wilson), who do their best to increase awareness of each artist’s achievements. Time will determine whether the work will be considered major; it is this writer’s belief that Tseng and Cheng will be included among the very best artists of their time.

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September 25th to November 15th, 2008
58 East 79th Street, between Madison and Park avenues
New York City, 212-861-4050

Despite its small confines, the gallery offered a broad view of Cheng’s art. One introspective, very beautiful work, Untitled (“Window” series, 1982) consists of gouache on rag board. A painting of middling size (30 by 40 inches), this work renders a window shadowed against a studio wall. The shadow of a thin divider between the top and bottom of the glass is painted, with the darkest part of the shadow occurring on the far left and growing more faint as it moves to the right. On the far right it is impossible to tell the shadow apart from the general condition of light, a circumstance due to Cheng’s extreme skill with the brush. In the “Window” series, we sense an exquisite craftsman at work; but we remember, too, that Cheng was a sharp critic of his own efforts, reconciling to the wastebasket pieces that he felt did not succeed. This work clearly did.
This exhibition of Ching Ho Cheng’s work, a small retrospective, showed viewers why his art had both critical respect and popular acceptance in the 1980s, before his tragically early death from AIDS at the end of that decade. Cheng came from a distinguished Chinese family; he was born in 1946 in Cuba, where his father served as a diplomat. Moving to New York five years later, Cheng and his family lived in Kew Gardens in Queens. After studying painting and sculpture at Cooper Union, Cheng spent some time in Europe but mostly remained in New York. He lived and worked at the famous Chelsea Hotel, and socialized at Max’s Kansas City, where he numbered among his friends the singers Debbie Harry and Bette Midler. In keeping with the times, Ching produced highly detailed, psychedelic paintings when he first began producing work in the 1960s. He soon changed, however, to studies of stars, subtle gouache visions of sunlight and shadows as they appeared in his studio, and perhaps most spectacularly, torn paper works that beautifully function as collages and abstract compositions. Cheng’s meticulous craft helped him create works whose precise imagery resulted in highly successful works of art.

According to Leanne Zalewski’s brief essay, Cheng turned to making torn-paper collages following his brief epiphany regarding form when he tore up a paper piece that did not suit him. The artist saw that he could bring about special effects by tearing his materials, which resulted in a style of resolute, close-to-pure abstraction. In The Certainty of Blue IX (1984), Cheng put together a striking group of materials, including charcoal, graphite, and pastel on torn rag paper. In the bottom of the collage, he offers a dark-blue expanse, which could be mountains or sea, above which an abstract organic form, created from the white of the paper itself, rests. The top of the images is black, with its edges defining the rough, rounded shape of the white area. On the top right, there is a silver gray form, whose upper limits compose a rectangular shape, while its lower edge, resting against the curves of the white area, is torn to fit against those curves.

One of the last methods Cheng used included metal that, once it oxidized, existed as a rough surface of rust whose compelling alchemy gave his audience a remarkable exterior to consider. The magic of these pieces results from contrasts in color as well as memorable differences in the finish of the paint and copper. We see it in the very strong triptych of 1988, an untitled piece of work that has three panels; each of the canvases is worked over with iron oxide and acrylic. In all three cases, the gestalt is the same—a large, rounded shape much like a boulder, framed by another organic form that adheres to the edge of the boulder and fills the rest of the space to the edge of the canvas. In panels I and II, we see the rounded shapes colored by rust, with the corresponding framing consisting of black acrylic paint. In panel III, the boulderlike form is black; the space its curves jut into is made up of the luminous gold-brown of the rust.

Cheng was an artist of unsual achievement, whose passing away left his audience bereft of someone who had begun to work in highly effective ways. No doubt the artist was a creature of his times, but his technical expertise stands out in contrast to much of the informal work being made while he was alive. Cheng therefore convinces on a double level—as a creator of unusual originality, and as an artisan whose technique neatly meshes with his images.

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