Emily CHENG: Opening of The Egg

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Emily CHENG: Opening of The Egg

16 March - 4 May 2024

Hanart TZ Gallery

Emily Cheng: OPENING of THE EGG

Artist Reception in a Soundscape
March 16, 2024 (Saturday) 2-6pm

Exhibition Period
March 16 to May 4, 2024

Hanart TZ Gallery
2/F Mai On Industrial Building, 17-21 Kung Yip Street, Kwai Chung, Hong Kong

Hanart TZ Gallery is honoured to present “Opening of the Egg”, a solo exhibition by Emily Cheng. In conjunction with the highlight display at our Art Basel Hong Kong (Booth 3D16), over 30 pieces of her work will be on view in this “Art Month”.

The opening reception, in the presence of the artist, will take place on Saturday, March 16, 2024, from 2 to 6pm, at Hanart TZ Gallery.

Responding to the energy and emotional nuances of Emily’s paintings, Composer-performer Kung Chi-Shing will perform his soundscape with violin, flute and electronics at the opening reception.

Emily Cheng 成瑞嫻 (b.1953) Pursuing Heaven, 2019 Flashe on Canvas 183 x 152 cm
Image courtesy of the artist and Hanart TZ Gallery 圖片由藝術家及漢雅軒提供

It happened that I opened the Egg and that the God left the Egg.

From “Liber Novus”, Carl Jung

In alchemy the Egg stands for the Chaos apprehended by artifex, the prima materia containing the captive world-soul. Out of the Egg will rise the Phoenix, the liberated soul, which is identical with the Anthropos who was imprisoned in the embrace of Nature.

From “Psychology and Alchemy”, Carl Jung

Emily Cheng’s art is a portrait gallery of the Soul in its multifarious manifestations. Each painting is a separate incarnation, inheriting a memory cultivated by its own special cross-pollination of cultural traditions. The richness of imageries her art delivers is itself a feast for the eye, and the pleasure they stir in art lovers direct them to other moments of delight, as they recognize figurative details from the global world of art.

Since the mid 1980s Emily Cheng has studied and accumulated imageries for her personal language, drawing from every tradition she encounters. Her eye is always directed to both their sensual pleasure, and to the aura they impart to the spaces they originally occupy. Her labour that went into reinventing these images, either into icons of their own, or combined to form pictorial worlds that echo with spiritual art of the past, has grown to such a distinguished corpus that it offers a personal reinterpretation of the lineage of spiritual painting. In an age when visual images dominate our everyday experience, Emily Cheng’s art continues to make painting convincing through her exploration of imageries that evoke deep historical memories that stir the Soul.

Chang Tsong-Zung

“…..Cheng’s work suggests: While the elaborate belief systems and the burning convictions of past times may no longer be ours to possess, we can—through appreciative reconstruction, reconfiguration, and reconsideration of their elements—come to a deep appreciation of all that they once offered. And that act of reclamation, beyond simply lamenting what we have lost, can spur us to new initiatives, aimed at creating vivid emblems for this place and time, this culture, this newly global commonweal.”

From “Beyond the Postmodern Dilemma”

Richard Vine

“For Cheng, the world of inner vision isn’t necessarily an ascension out of the body and human affairs; it is instead an interiority that is exploded into exteriority by painting. If one insists on calling it spiritual, then it is an erotic spirituality that never abandons the body even as it invokes the Logos of symbolic organization and presentation.”

From “A Pilgrim’s Pan-Theistic Progress”

Stephen Westfall

“Cheng’s paintings certainly have their cognitive dimension, but the larger case that they make for sensuousness lies outside discourses of either desire or beauty. They are as incompatible with guilt as a passing crush, ….. Ultimately, they show us that pleasure is not just a way of making sense of the world, but also a way of bringing meaning to it. We have always needed that.”

From “Pleasure As Medium”

Jonathan Hay

Emily Cheng 成瑞嫻 (b.1953) Saturn Venus Mars, 2023 Flashe on Canvas 211 x 178 cm (Studio View)
Image courtesy of the artist and Hanart TZ Gallery 圖片由藝術家及漢雅軒提供