Ching Ho Cheng: The Poetics of Process
Author / Christina Shen
Originally published on ArtAsiaPacific Issue 147 Mar/Apr 2026 Features
Ching Ho Cheng’s ever-evolving practice reveals the artist’s restless desire to give material form to the metaphysical forces shaping the universe. In his career of just two decades, Cheng left behind a rich trove of works that has only continued to accrue long-overdue critical attention. Yet recent efforts to foreground Cheng’s life and art underscore the difficulty of encapsulating his expansive visual vocabulary—and the fullness of his lived experience—without flattening their complexity. In 2024, the artist was included in two acclaimed group exhibitions in his home of New York City: “The Appearance: Art of the Asian Diaspora in Latin America & the Caribbean” at the Americas Society and “Legacies: Asian American Art Movements in New York City” at 80WSE. Although framing Cheng with cultural and geographic markers offers valuable context for his identity as a Cuban-born, ethnically Chinese artist who lived in the US, it only accounts for one facet of his story.
A more illuminating perspective may be to consider Cheng through his lack of conformity to mainstream identity and artist groups. He was positioned at the margins of established movements and networks as he came of age in the height of 1960s counterculture and developed his artistic approach in the experimental milieu of Downtown New York in the ’70s. Cheng found close friends and lovers in the likes of bohemian occultist Vali Myers and underground performance icon Tally Brown. His practice steadfastly explored the medium of paper and metaphysical themes that transcend the magnitude of human experience, taking decisive formal turns that are often described in four key phases: the psychedelic, gouache, torn, and alchemical works. However, their distinctive stylistic qualities belie a deep conceptual continuity. Whether in prismatic, hypersaturated gouaches inspired by Tibetan art or iron oxide-treated papers torn into reduced shapes, Cheng’s art reflects a persistent inquiry into how process and materiality can serve as metaphors for cosmic and spiritual forces.
Cheng was born in Havana in 1946 to Rosita Yufan and Robert Paifong, the last ambassador to Cuba representing the Republic of China before Mao Zedong’s Chinese Communist Party rose to power. In 1951, the Cheng family immigrated to Kew Gardens, Queens, in New York. Cheng, who showed early artistic inclinations, enrolled at Cooper Union in 1964. He lived in the East Village and SoHo during a period marked by major social movements—civil rights, antiwar, feminist, and gay liberation movements, among others. Amid this climate of unrest and transformation, countercultural currents popularized the use of psychoactive substances to expand consciousness and seek spiritual awakening, often informed by elements of Eastern religion. Aligning with the spirit of his times, Cheng became deeply interested in Taoism and experimented with hallucinogenic drugs to access different orders of consciousness, which formed the basis of his psychedelic gouache paintings.
Angelhead, painted in 1968, presents a hypnotic field of biomorphic shapes and floating mouths that bare their teeth both seductively and menacingly. A cube patterned allover with dots anchors the central region of the painting, from which countless sperm-like shapes swim outward in radial multiplication, making the entire background pulsate with a sea of blues, purples, and reds. Dropped into this dislocating environment, one feels as if they, too, are a bundle of cells functioning within a larger, harmonious ecosystem. Angelhead’s graphic style demonstrates a strong aesthetic connection to Pop art, Op art, and other illustrative art forms that influenced psychedelic art. These otherworldly qualities return with enhanced narrativity and Taoist philosophy in Astral Theater (1973), which Cheng painted five years later.
In Astral Theater, a tattooed figure is depicted in deep thought with a green butterfly fluttering overhead, set against an intricately painted background. The painting draws on Zhuangzi’s “Dream of the Butterfly,” a Taoist parable from the Warring States Period (475–221 BCE). In this text, the Chinese philosopher wakes from a dream to question whether he is a man who dreamt he was a butterfly, or a butterfly dreaming it is a man. The fable highlights the Taoist idea that common distinctions made between states of being—human and animal, wakefulness and dreaming, subjective experience and objective reality—are highly interconnected and in constant flux. Floating outside this contemplative scene are two discrete environments, each filled with numerous humanoid creatures with elongated bodies, many of whom burst forth from green spherical cocoons. By portraying the birth of new life forms and astral bodies, Cheng gestures toward the relativity and cyclicality of time. His psychedelic pieces are visually layered and dense in symbolic meaning, constructing optically magnificent scenes that suggest a larger universal order.
As Cheng formed his social circles in Downtown New York, meeting friends in storied spaces like the Chelsea Hotel and Max’s Kansas City, he periodically traveled to Europe, frequently staying in Paris with his former classmate and close friend Dui Seid. In the mid-70s, Cheng transitioned away from rendering surreal scenes toward capturing the mundane details of his everyday environment. He did so with the aid of an airbrush, which he employed to create seamless, gradient backgrounds. Whether depicting the sinuous lines that make up the woodgrain of his floorboards or the thin chips of paint peeling from his studio walls, Cheng honed his attention toward inanimate objects, tenderly transcribing what he saw as the latent energy present in all matter. He also drastically reduced the visual density of his canvases, often isolating a single subject against a field of color to create breathing space and allow one’s eyes to traverse the expanse of his compositions.
In his gouache series, Cheng paid particular attention to light in its multiple manifestations. Freeway Lights (1977) portrays the luminosity of four towering streetlights against a darkening sky and a crescent moon, juxtaposing the enduring artificial glow against their natural counterpart. In other works like Floor Show (1978), Cheng painted an evocative scene of cigarettes and matchsticks scattered in a depthless purple void—some of which burn with a halo while emitting long tails of smoke across the painting. This work invites an intimate encounter with the fierce but dying flame of discarded matchsticks, freezing them in a moment of illumination before their inevitable extinguishing. Light’s transience is further emphasized in Cheng’s many paintings of palmetto plant shadows cast upon bare walls, directional sunlight filtering through window frames, and prismatic flares that leave spectral colors across room interiors. The most abstract and minimal expression of luminosity appears in Cheng’s Shadow Box paintings: airbrushed surfaces that suggest incomplete rectilinear structures diffused into space. On the one hand, these works naturalistically represent exterior light cast through a window and onto a wall, but their muted surfaces also act as physical backdrops, receiving the shifting light and shadows of their surrounding space.
Altogether, the gouache works reveal Cheng’s sensitive exploration of temporality and ephemerality. His paintings remarkably shift between timescales, moving from the radiance of ancient stars to the momentary flash of refracted light. As Cheng said of these paintings, “it has been my intention to lift what one sees out of its particular frame of reference; to provide a new vantage point to what is germane to the experience of seeing.” By isolating detritus, everyday objects, and light itself, he lends them new poignancy, revealing how inanimate things can serve as powerful vehicles through which we see our own impermanent and contingent condition of being.
Cheng took his conceptual exploration of metaphysical phenomena to new ends when he shifted from using paper as a flat painting support to treating it as a material to be ripped apart and collaged together. This simple gesture introduced a new dimensionality to the paper, recording the aftermath of a physical and instantaneous choreography. As Cheng recounted, “In 1982, after working on a drawing for several days, I tore it up in exasperation. Unwittingly, I made the discovery that the spontaneous or accidental gesture has a powerful impact of its own, a kind of dissonance in the order of things.”
Untitled (Blue and Black Torn Work) (1985) exemplifies the striking visual effect of Cheng’s torn works. A curved gash runs down the center of the work, creating a harsh white split. To its left is a matte black ground with a reflective graphite rectangle jutting out of its laceration, while the right side presents a smooth, electric blue ground. Like many torn works, the colors and textures of Untitled allude to outer space. Seen also in UFO III (1985), reflective geometric shapes bearing an uneven surface of bumps evoke the speckled surface of planetary bodies. Discussing the significance of his aleatory paper tearing, Cheng expressed, “I tear paper, and make these drawings to reaffirm a primordial drama, the ever-recurring cycle of birth, life, death, and regeneration. It is my intention that process and metaphor circumnavigate the same sphere.” His process reflected the interconnected forces of destruction and creation, as the works are only made possible through mauling the paper’s original form.
Taoist philosophical thought appears in this series through the entwining of opposing creative forces and through the principles of the I Ching—a classic Chinese divination manual foundational to both Confucianism and Taoism. Although Cheng’s torn works appear to be born out of improvisation, he made countless preparatory drawings to guide his approach. This methodology imbues the works with a balance of intentionality and unpredictability, echoing tenets of Taoism and the I Ching that Cheng often consulted for guidance. He wrote in 1984 that “No sheet of paper can be torn quite like another. Tearing reflects the singularity of a moment in time.” Likewise, the I Ching operates on meaning derived from a split instance, when fate determines how coins are cast and brings forth the reading of a particular hexagram. The I Ching recognizes change as the greatest constant and sees every occurrence as being interrelated to a web of other possible actions and events. Cheng’s paper tearing similarly produces an abundance of potential outcomes. The instantaneity of the tear, akin to the casting of coins, holds multiple horizons of aftermaths even as it preserves a unique state upon actualization.
As Cheng was experimenting with torn and collaged paper, HIV and AIDS infections were rising rapidly in the US, becoming a catalyst for public dissent among activists and artists in New York. Government inaction and widespread social stigmatization delayed meaningful responses, resulting in hundreds of thousands falling ill and dying throughout the ’80s before effective antiretroviral treatments became available in the mid-90s. This devastating public health crisis directly affected many of Cheng’s close friends and collaborators, inevitably confronting him with his own mortality. Within this context, his art takes on deeper resonance as testaments to the fateful forces of time and chance. Cheng’s late practice pushed further into explorations of uncontrollable transformation and decay via the realm of chemistry, introducing copper and iron oxide into his abstract alchemical works.
The Grotto (1987), a large-scale installation that stretched across the window display of the Grey Art Gallery in New York, embodies the spirit of Cheng’s alchemical series. The 25-feet long arch was unevenly covered with raised ocher welts that appeared at once delicate and fortified, conjuring the organic textures of ossified rock and ancient ruins. Cheng achieved this striking material quality by covering torn rag paper with layers of gesso and modeling paste before further coating it with copper or iron powder. He then submerged the coated paper into large baths of water and vinegar, allowing copper and ferric oxide—commonly known as rust—to bubble up on its surface over the span of weeks. This time-intensive process resulted in unbroken geometric shapes encrusted with a patinated landscape. Recurring forms Cheng made include circular loops, scythe-like curves, and cinched rectangular shapes he described as “torsos.”
Cheng’s designation of these works as “alchemical” not only underscores their chemical origins but also reinforces their engagement with ancient, occult belief systems that sought to transmute physical matter in pursuit of metaphysical ends. Alchemy endeavored to transform base metals into precious substances to procure an immortality elixir and achieve spiritual purification, reflecting humanity’s longstanding desire for universal order, the ability to transcend mortality, and communion with the cosmos. Cheng’s oxidation of copper and iron similarly instigated material change to illuminate fundamental human conditions. His rust accumulations reaffirm the inseparability of life and death, as iron’s apparent growth into rust simultaneously signals its decay. The works’ mottled surfaces also register the mark of time upon matter, which render them inherently impermanent. Even in their seemingly stabilized, rusted state, Cheng’s alchemical output remains vulnerable to erosion.
By the end of the ’80s, Cheng was in a battle with his own illness and acutely aware of his diminishing time. Even then, he was singularly devoted to his practice, continuing to produce abstract compositions using iron and copper oxides and incorporating substances such as sandpaper, varnish, and carborundum to manipulate texture and dimensionality. When Cheng passed away on May 25, 1989 from AIDS-related causes, he left behind a diverse body of work that expressed his lifelong pursuit of material experimentation as a mode of cosmic and spiritual inquiry.
At a time when few Asian American artists received recognition, Cheng’s opportunities and achievements did not come easily, and the stylistic pivots he made over his career attest to the independence and determination of his vision. From his early maximalist paintings to his later sculptural works, Cheng remained invested in using different processes to convey imagined sites that straddle both physical and immaterial realms. Amid life’s challenges, Cheng embraced the ephemeral and unknown, grounded in a belief in the universe’s balance and interconnectedness. Whether in the meticulously rendered flames of his candlelight paintings or the raw edges of his torn paper works, Cheng affirmed the wisdom that arises from sustained attention to the preciousness of the world.
*All quotes from the artist were found in the Ching Ho Cheng papers at the Archives of American Art, Smithsonian Institution.*
