Emily Cheng's painting career has been a continuous search for visual methods that render the Sacred visually graspable.

Spiritual art's best-known method is probably sacred geometry, an ancient practice that today continues to strongly influence the art and architecture of the Islamic and Christian world. Geometry is a language of ideal forms known to all cultures, and to a varying extent, a tool used universally. However, even though the rational basis of geometry allows it to make universal claims, these are not "total" claims. Geometry is only one of the many frameworks through which the mystery of the cosmos manifests. How otherwise might the design of the Sacred be revealed is a constant query behind Emily Cheng's artistic pursuit. 

In her paintings, one finds both geomancy and geometry, DNA spirals and Daoist talisman, electromagnetic grids and qi-energy network. For Cheng, knowledge ancient and modern are equivalent tools for creating a grammar and an artistic language showing how humans may speak to the cosmos and communicate with the world at large. 

Words by Chang Tsong-Zung

Emily Cheng’s (b. 1953, New York, USA; lives and works in New York) partial list of exhibitions include solo shows at the Central Art Museum in Hangzhou, Shenzhen Art Museum, Bronx Museum in New York,  Museum of Contemporary Art Taipei, Metropolitan Museum of Manila, Ayala Museum in Manila, the Cincinnati Center for Contemporary Art, Johanniterkirche Feldkirch in Austria, Hanart Gallery and Louis Vuitton Espace in Hong Kong. Her work has also been featured in notable group exhibitions including Shanghai Biennale, MASS MoCA, Guangzhou Triennial at Guangdong Art Museum, Hubei Triennial in Wuhan, Yerba Buena Center for the Arts in San Francisco, The China Institute, National Academy of Design and American Academy of Arts and Letters in New York, Katonah Museum of Art, Hong Kong Arts Centre, and MOCA Shanghai.  She has received numerous awards and fellowships, including those from the New York Foundation for the Arts, the National Endowment for the Arts, the Pollock-Krasner Foundation, and a Yaddo fellowship. She has been the subject of two books, Chasing Clouds, A Decade of Studies, published by Time Zone 8 and Emily Cheng in the Weave of Worlds, Alchemy in Painting published by Archive Books in Berlin.