Painter & Fine Artist best known for large scale paintings with radiantly colored, radially composed
Emily Cheng is an artist, professor and curator, born in New York City. She received her BFA from Rhode Island School of Design and attended the New York Studio School. Her renowned artworks are large-scale paintings with a central focus that frequently use vast circular imagery that are radially arranged and brilliantly colored. In her pieces resonate themes like the world, wholeness, fragile beauty, celebration, center. Since she is investigating with her gaze through chaos and world rich and complicated history, she leaves behind visual hints about many cultures and ideologies. Painting for Emily Cheng, is the evidence of an inquiry: is the mind reminded; is the hunch made vivid; is the shadow of the unfamiliar; is the acting out of desire; is the probe of limits; is the life images. Her paintings aim to provide a form of personal recalibration.
She has received a National Endowment for the Arts Fellowship, 1982–1983, a Yaddo Fellowship, 1995, a New York Foundation for the Arts Fellowship, 1996, and a Pollock Krasner Foundation Award, 2010. Cheng produced the world religions exhibition Charting Sacred Territories in 2011, which debuted at the Museum of Contemporary Art Taipei, Taiwan, and went on to the Hanart TZ Gallery in 2015, the Shenzhen Art Museum in Shenzhen, China, in 2015, and the Palais Liechtenstein Feldkirch in Austria in 2019. She teaches Studio Art and Chinese, Japanese, and Korean Art History at the School of Visual Arts in New York. In addition to Cooper Union, New York University, Cal Arts, Parsons School of Art, and Rhode Island School of Design, are a few of the prior universities that have offered her teaching seats. Other teaching appointments have included guest lectures at Stanford University, Yale University, Carnegie Mellon, and Williams College. With more than 50 exhibits, including six solo museum shows in the US, China, Taiwan, and the Philippines, her artwork has been widely shown in the US as well as abroad. Timezone 8 issued a monograph titled Chasing Clouds, a decade of research on her work, while the New York Times, Huffington Post, Hong Kong Standard, Philippine Star, and Art in America have all reviewed her shows.
Emily Cheng’s official site and Instagram
This interview was first published in issue no. 17 of the free digital magazine Planet China.
Can you tell us about your beginnings? What motivated you to become an artist? What were the major challenges during that time? Have you had any unexpected experiences that caused you to question if you were on the right path?
I became an artist in part because I loved to make paintings starting in fourth grade. I began taking kiddie lessons and in high school began going to classes for teens and ended up at RISD and the New York Studio School to focus on painting.
Yes, of course there were times I thought, (what would life be like if I quit painting and pursue something else? I also looked at the painters around me and thought- if they can keep going, I can too!) I never thought about my race or gender until it became such a big topic in the media. Then I thought, ok, work harder- and make their doubts go away.
The imagery in your body of artwork creates a strong sense of gravity and harmony. How do you decide which elements and what belongs at the core of your paintings?
The weight and gravity are determined by what it is I want to convey. For example, if I’m talking about an upward motion or an ascension, )which is often a big subject in my work) then gravity is paramount to the standing body. And then earthly weight is contrasted with a lighter feeling – air—for example. Harmony is related to a sense of wholeness and wholeness is related to feeling of oneness. We generally feel separate and apart when we could otherwise feel connected and unified. These are qualities that we must cultivate to unlearn a lot of what we were taught.
Your pieces of artwork have been described as “radiantly colored and radially composed.” How do you balance structure and spontaneity within your compositions?
Radiant color creates movement when combined with the right colors and shapes. It can direct the eye. Radial refers either to the center moving out or from the edge to the center. The spontaneity in the paintings come from the balance of the details -which can be very labor intensive contrasted with larger and freer brush movements that are spontaneous and unplanned. It can also come from part of the painting that isn’t quite working so I’m finding a new route and destroying or covering.
Looking back at your body of work, how has your approach to using space and color evolved over time? Can you share a story behind a piece that has a special meaning to you?
The space in my paintings have overall become deeper- and more into limitless spaces beyond our planet. Here the trick is to not make “holes” in the canvas and to keep the flatness and three dimensional quality present. And the contrasting scale of the monumental and the tiny can also be spatial markers.
Your artwork often draws viewers into a central focal point. Your circular compositions inherently challenge the idea of a linear narrative. What impact do you want to communicate with your visual storytelling?
I don’t think I’m ever trying to tell a story. Linearity can be an illusion. Rather, I’m interested in creating individual experiences for my audience. Perhaps of feeling their bodies, or a sense of quietude, or uplifted out of their “to do” list to something greater. Or maybe questions are provoked.
How do traditional Chinese artistic or philosophical elements influence treated your visual language? Do you see your motifs as a reinterpretation of cultural or spiritual symbols, and how do they reflect your own Chinese-American identity?
When I first began using Chinese imagery, it was definitively to dig into my ancestral roots and see what they could reveal about my people. Now, rather than use the imagery, I think I’m tapping into the ideas, philosophy and depictions of QI.
To be a Chinese American is a funny thing. You are brought up in a western culture of schools, culture and media. But at some point, I was more interested in knowing about my genetic past, my historical or artistic past and the unconscious attitudes I might have as a result of coming from both an ancient and very rich culture.
We live in social media and A.I. era. As an artist whose paintings bridge different cultural and artistic traditions, how do you see art’s contribution in shaping dialogues within communities and overcome biases?
In the end we are all humans. We are all born, are balanced by our two arms, two legs, an inner core, a feeling heart, have a need to eat, or to confront the idea of an impending death of our human bodies, seek love and community. Art can contribute in myriad ways to our perception of our lives, by presenting these multiple viewpoints but nothing can penetrate the mind or body if they are not open and here is where art can provoke. We will for -ever have biases, but we need to be taught just to recognize we are having biases rather than pushing our own views or presences as the correct one -to recognize that all these differences are creating division and perhaps there is another way to approach this whole situation.
The International Women’s Day 2025 focuses on “Accelerate Action”. What do you hope for the next generation of women? In what ways do you think women can best equip themselves to challenge systemic barriers and pursue their dreams without the constraints of traditional gender expectations?
Women are human and have different attributes than men. To realize that you can utilize all choices and power (if you want to) is the ultimate freedom. This is the goal for the next generation of women. Live with an awareness of your ultimate freedom. See where your prison bars are and how they got there.
Photos and images courtesy of Emily Cheng
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