ABOUT THE ARTIST

Amy Cheng is a Taiwanese-American artist celebrated for her richly layered, geometrically intricate paintings and large-scale public art. Born in Taiwan and raised in Brazil, Oklahoma, and Texas, she earned a BFA from the University of Texas at Austin and an MFA from Hunter College, CUNY. Her practice explores micro and macro scales, balancing light and dark, soft and hard edges, with a depth that evokes both cosmic and earthly patterns.

Cheng has completed a dozen permanent public art commissions in mosaic, ceramic, glass, and terrazzo, including projects at Seattle-Tacoma International Airport, Lambert–St. Louis MetroLink, Chicago’s Howard Street El Station, and multiple Brooklyn subway stations. Her work is represented in numerous corporate and public collections, including the Hyde Collection, Novartis Pharmaceuticals, NYU Langone Medical Center, and Hewlett-Packard. She has received two New York Foundation for the Arts Painting Fellowships, a P.S.122 Painting Center Fellowship, Arts International travel grants, and Fulbright Teaching and Research Fellowships in Brazil and China.

She has also been awarded residencies at prestigious venues such as the MacDowell Colony, Yaddo, the Millay Colony, Vermont Studio Center, Ragdale, Virginia Center for the Creative Arts, McColl Center for Visual Art, Saltonstall Foundation, and Fundación Valparaíso in Spain. Cheng is Professor Emerita of Art at SUNY New Paltz.

STATEMENT

In painting I invent a visual vocabulary that speculates on the mysteries of the Universe at both macro and micro levels. Inspired by astrophysics and quantum physics, my images hover between abstraction and representation, employing layers, intricacy, geometry, pattern, illusion, and implied movement.

Classical physics shows us that time and space form a continuum, warped by massive bodies like the Sun and Earth. Quantum physics reveals even stranger truths: particles behaving impossibly, existing in two places at once. I believe deeply in empirical science and its power to illuminate, yet I heed philosopher Thomas Nagel’s warning that it would be a mistake to treat science as the only path to objectivity, for its methods do not encompass everything we yearn to know.

I work at the intersection of science, visual art and ancient Indian philosophies and aim to poetically and metaphorically imagine how consciousness exists in the Universe.