Ching Ho Cheng: Tracing Infinity
BANK/MABSOCIETY, New York, 2 May – 14 June
Tracing Infinity is a show of Ching Ho Cheng’s gouache and pastel works on rag paper dating between 1978 and 1982. Rendered in thin, almost airbrushed layers of pigment, these minimalist pictures come from a period in the Havana-born artist’s oeuvre which saw the subject matter of his work reduced to the interior of his living space. They succeed and counteract the elaborate ‘psychedelic’ paintings Cheng created in the early 1970s and presage his ‘torn paper’ and ‘alchemical’ experiments of the 1980s. In the abstract pastel works on view at BANK NYC, light is arrested and compressed into wedges of rust, marigold and pink. Figurative gouache works like Untitled (Window Diptych) (1980) contain details such as a grubby plastic light switch painted at two different times of day. In a horizontal blue hour gouache from 1982, a nail left in the wall looks from afar like a tiny human figure traversing an expansive void, casting a shadow four times its height. One may not be able tell from looking at these spare works that they depict a room in the Chelsea Hotel in New York, where Cheng lived from 1976 until his death in 1989, and that behind any of Cheng’s depicted walls might have been a raucous party attended by the likes of Andy Warhol, David Hockney and Charles James. Cheng was not, in any way, a recluse in his daily life, but his works here evince a profound familiarity with solitude.
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