top of page
Search

Artist Amy Cheng



Amy Cheng is a New York City-based visual artist. She was born in Taiwan, raised in Brazil, Oklahoma, and Texas, and is a widely exhibited painter who maintains a parallel career in public art. She received a BFA in Painting from the University of Texas at Austin, and an MFA in Painting from Hunter College, City University of New York.


Her paintings and works on paper are held in a number of corporate and public collections, including the Hyde Collection, Glens Falls, NY, Sheraton Hotels, Brussels, Belgium, Florida Atlantic University, Boca Raton, FL, Novartis Pharmaceuticals, Philadelphia, PA, New York University Langone Medical Center, and Hewlett-Packard, San Francisco.


She has completed a dozen permanent commissions fabricated in mosaic, glass, ceramic, terrazzo and more. These include projects at the Seattle-Tacoma International Airport, WA, the Howard Street El Station, Chicago, IL, the 25th Avenue Subway Station, Brooklyn, NY, and Western State Hospital, Tacoma, WA.


She has received two New York Foundation for the Arts Painting Fellowships, a Senior Research/Lecture Fulbright to USP, São Paulo, Brazil, and a Fulbright Teaching Fellowship at Renmin University, Beijing, China. She is a Professor Emerita of the Art Department at the State University of New York at New Paltz.



"I build complex worlds that move between the astral macro and the subatomic micro all at once. I paint what exists but is unseeable — the invisible forces that bind and animate life. What draws me is the hard problem of consciousness: that most fundamental and still-unanswered question of where awareness comes from, how we access it, and whether, as physicist Federico Faggin and others propose, consciousness is not generated by matter but is the very substrate from which matter arises, a concept ancient Indian Vedic philosophy has held for thousands of years. My work sits at the intersection of empirical science, Western philosophy, and ancient Ayurvedic thought. My layered acrylic gouache and oil marker paintings on wood panel are densely packed with shifting space, movement, and vibrating energy. Rather than illustrating consciousness, I use flowers as embodiments of its essence — enlivening, buoyant, life-affirming—and construct around them an invented abstract world of biological and geometrical forms, pattern, repetition, and ornamentation, My love of pattern and decoration is both innate and cultural. My nervous system has always resonated with the ornamentation, rhythm, and repetition so pervasive in Far Eastern and Middle Eastern art — a visual language I now use to ask questions science has yet to answer."





Tell us a little about yourself (where you are from) and your background in the arts.

I was born in Taiwan, we moved to Brazil when I was 5 to 10, then we immigrated to the US (to Oklahoma City, and later Dallas, TX). I got a BFA at UT Austin and an MFA at Hunter College. I lived in the Mid-Hudson Valley for 30 years teaching at Bard College and later SUNY New Paltz.


Along with my studio work I have a parallel career in public art. I have more than a dozen completed works installed across the US, the majority of them in airports and other public transit stations.


What kind of work are you currently making?

I am making imaginative, poetic, metaphorical paintings centered on the phenomena of consciousness. I use acrylic gouache and oil marker on wood panels.


What is a day like in the studio for you?

My studio in NYC's South Bronx is not large, about 400 sq. ft. with almost half of the space taken up by storage (painting racks and flat file). I love my studio. I love being in my studio. It has a wall of high-ceilinged windows. I try to go to there every weekday for about 6 hours. This has only been possible in the last 4-1/2 years whenI took early retirement from full time teaching.


What are you looking at right now and/or reading?

I listen to a lot of audio books. I love literature, but I also read memoirs, biographies, and non-fiction.


I am concentrating on learning something about science: biology, botany, ethology, even some physics.


Where can we find more of your work? (ex. website/insta/gallery/upcoming shows)





Comments

bottom of page