The rediscovery of artist Ching Ho Cheng has been a long time coming. Maybe one reason for the art world’s belated recognition is the fact that Cheng was a queer, Chinese-American artist who never made his sexual or racial identity the subject of his work. ‘I’ve never been traditionally Chinese,’ Cheng once stated matter-of-factly: ‘I’ve always been an outsider in the Chinese community.’
Born in 1946 in Havana, Cheng was the son of a Chinese diplomat for the Republic of China, which made the family’s return to China untenable once the People’s Republic was established in 1949. The Cheng family arrived in the United States in 1951. They settled in Queens, New York, where Cheng grew up to spend summers taking classes at the Arts Students League before studying painting at Cooper Union School of Art from 1964 to 1968, living in the East Village and then Soho, and hanging out at the popular artist’s bar, Max’s Kansas City, frequented by Andy Warhol and his entourage. Cheng moved into the Chelsea Hotel in 1976. At the time, a shift from conceptual art to Neo-Expressionism left the art world with little motivation to pay attention to a spiritual Chinese-American artist working in gouache on rag paper, who was too restless to develop a signature style.
According to Simon Wu, who curated an exhibition of works by Cheng at David Zwirner in 2021, Cheng had a ‘lifelong interest’ in ‘the cyclical nature of life and death.’ His first substantial body of work consisted of colorful, luminous, and intricately detailed compositions inspired by altered states. In his review of these psychedelic paintings, the poet and translator David Rattray observed a striking concern with the origins of life and the cosmos in Cheng’s compositions, as well the analogous psychic event referred to in Vedantic literature as the opening of the third eye. ‘My work all says the same thing; I only keep trying to say it in a new way, a way it was never said before,’ Cheng once explained. ‘None of it is really new, however; they've said it again and again, and it's as old as the hills. All I can claim is that mine is a way of seeing I've never encountered anywhere else.’ Cheng viewed attempts by non-native artists at rehashing traditional ichnographies – Tibetan, Hopi, or Navajo, for example – with contempt. ‘All of these have been rendered with infinitely greater honesty (and better technique) by the native practitioners themselves,’ he noted.
Cheng’s emphatic rejection of appropriation, a commonplace art practice, was made in the pursuit of a far more difficult achievement: originality. His psychedelic works teem with precisely depicted details, encompassing cosmic orbs, flames, sperm, segmented tubular forms, lips, and teeth. Packed with small details and scale shifts, Sun Drawing (1970) pulls the viewer closer to see worms crawling across the black cheeks of a grinning sun. The experience is weird and unsettling; where the sun’s life-giving light collapses into its heat-driven decay. But rather than follow his contemporaries to develop this imagery further by working in a larger scale, Cheng pivoted in the late 1970s to go in a completely different direction – something he would do throughout his life before it was cut short in 1989.
Shifting attention away from symbolic subject matter, Waterfall, Chelsea Hotel, New York (1978) offers an intimate view of the artist’s bathroom. Rendered in gouache and ink on paper, a shiny stainless-steel showerhead is depicted in profile against a pink square-tiled wall topped by a row of oblong black tiles, above which paint peels. In keeping with the collapse of life and death that Cheng captured in the face of a smiling sun, water is here depicted as both essential to life and capable of whittling it away. Faced with inescapable dissolution and decay, the flaking paint signals an encroaching absence: to be clean is temporary and the signs of entropy are everywhere – art is neither a bulwark against time nor a refuge from its effects.
Shortly after completing this group of domestic perspectives – which include views of light bulbs surrounded by haloes of light; the shadow of a plant cast on a wall; an ironing board; squashed beer cans; cigarette butts and burnt matches – Cheng turned his focus to the most ephemeral subject of all: light, as it appears when it streams through windows to create luminous shadows on blank walls. In the triptych Untitled (1980), light is perceived as a constantly changing phenomenon. Starting at the left panel, a yellow rectangle divided by a horizontal line on a bilious green wall creates the shadowy imprint of a window complete with its lock. In the middle painting, the window becomes a parallelogram, in keeping with the moving sun, which the final panel completes with a sharply angled isosceles triangle jutting in and down from the right edge. On each panel, paint peels off at the lower left corner, creating two scales of time: passing light and the slow disintegration of one’s surroundings. Those scales unite once again in Untitled (1982), where melancholy hues of blue capture evening light reflected on a wall with a solitary silver nail glinting in the corner. Something has been removed yet nothing has replaced it.
There is a deep feeling of solitude in these paintings – both in their subject matter and in the precision of their painstakingly painted surfaces, which act as a physical record of the artist’s contemplation of time passing through the process of painting itself. It is a mortal condition that all humans share, and which Cheng never lost sight of. Knowing he could not stop time, he slowed it down in order to scrutinize it. Again and again, he found ways to contemplate mortality in immaculately composed surfaces defined by unassuming subjects, luminous colors, and subtle shifts in form.
Towards the end of his life, Cheng soaked paper in water, adding gesso and acrylic paint to turn the material into a hard object. Subsequently, he added iron or copper dust and placed the paper back in the water, causing it to rust red or oxidize green. In the ‘Grotto’ series, he hung these textured, torn, curvilinear sheets on the wall to form abstract arrangements evoking the surfaces of caves. These ‘masterful torn paper pieces defy categorization,' wrote the critic Gail Stavitsky in 1987. ‘Neither drawings, collages, paintings, nor sculptures, these pieces “exist somewhere at an intersecting point” between the four mediums.’
