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Emily Cheng at Winston, Wachter Mayer - New York - Brief Article
Art in America, July, 2002 by Lilly Wei
"Lavish" best describes New York-based painter Emily Cheng's latest venture. It's a nonstop extravaganza of intricately patterned lace, billowed draperies, swirling ribbons, delicately curled vines, tiny rosebuds and other flora, including, curiously enough, a precise, prettily delineated cabbage, plus much more--all details and decorative motifs garnered from many sources across time and cultures, East and West. Cheng takes appropriation global. These purloined furbelows, both abstract and figurative, are frequently transformed, at times beyond recognition. Arrayed in delectable designer colors--pouty shades of pink and giddy red, sun-kissed yellows, posh aquamarine, plummy aubergine and so forth--they are persuasive advocates of ornamentation's many charms.
The exhibition offered a generous assortment of works: several medium to medium-large paintings and a long lineup of smaller oils, as well as a grid installation of layered, handkerchief-sized gouache-and-pencil drawings on glazed Mylar, tacked casually to the wall. The larger paintings resemble mandalas that have been given a secularizing, feminizing makeover. Often, a deftly drawn form--point d'Alencon lace in the form of a stained-glass rose window, the above-mentioned cabbage or a swatch of wavering stripes and starry daffodils--holds center stage, presented like a Harry Winston jewel pillowed in light. The emerald-green Silent Elaborations (2000), red-furled All Pleasures (2000) and yellow-and-diaphanous-white A Chiffon Moment (2001) hint at a tongue-in-cheek sensuality, a kind of bedroom art of euphemistically crumpled fabric and flowery bowers.
Royally (2001), a red-and-lime-green confection with a lacy filagree; Base (2001), a lace doily over pale blue-gray; and Prussian Bloom (2001), derived from a blue-and-white porcelain pattern, are all close-up views of the compositions of the larger paintings. The little drawings, with their superimposed images brushed and penciled on sheets of overlaid Mylar, are still closer to the larger works in design and might serve as a sketchbook of motifs to be combined and elaborated for future paintings. One of the few exceptions to the general gaiety is Pulse (2001), a dark, brooding globe with blackened vines and seared leaves, a memento mori that makes you pause in the midst of this feast. For the most part, though, Cheng unreservedly celebrates spectacle. This is formalism with a flirtatious wink, beauty with brains.
COPYRIGHT 2002 Brant Publications, Inc.
COPYRIGHT 2002 Gale Group
