Ching Ho Cheng

Ching Ho Cheng was an artist active in New York City from the late 1960s through the 1980s. He described himself as working “with” as opposed to “on” paper, using a variety of means, including drawing, painting, printing, tearing, and oxidizing.

Cheng was born in Havana, Cuba, where his father served as the ambassador for the Chinese Nationalist government. The Chinese Revolution of 1949 uprooted the Cheng family, however, as they could no longer stay in Cuba nor return to China under Mao Zedong’s newly established regime. Seeking refuge in the United States, the family settled in Queens, New York by 1951. Despite this, Cheng remained a “stateless” person until 1978, when he finally attained U.S. citizenship.

Cheng’s formal art education began with summer classes at the Arts Students League and continued at the Cooper Union School of Art, which he enrolled in 1964 to study painting and sculpture. Early in his career, Cheng primarily worked in gouache and ink. Later dubbed his “Psychedelics,” his brightly colored, highly detailed paintings of the late 1960s and early 1970s reflect Cheng’s interest in Tibetan tantric art as well as Taoist teachings about the cyclical nature of life and death, an idea that would remain a throughline in his artistic practice.

Cheng’s highly individual style first attracted an audience in Europe, which led him to spend some of the 1970s in Paris and Amsterdam. When Cheng returned to New York City in 1976, he settled into an apartment at the Chelsea Hotel, immersing himself in its eclectic artistic community. While the metaphysical essence of his work remained, his gouache paintings shifted to focus on ordinary yet symbolic objects such as peaches, matches, cigarette butts, and light bulbs—images he described as “intimations of the miraculous.” He translated several of these motifs into a series of silkscreen prints. Cheng also developed a body of quiet interior vignettes, paintings that are at once hyper realistic and nearly abstract, examining the effects of cast shadow and light against the walls of his apartment.

In 1981, Cheng’s artistic practice changed direction from drawing and painting on paper to using paper as a material for collage and installation. The spontaneous act of tearing a drawing led to his extended series of “Torn Paper” works exploring themes of creation, destruction, and renewal. In many of these works, Cheng juxtaposed wide surfaces of black charcoal and metallic-grey graphite against blocks of bright, saturated colors. Prominently featured are the colors blue and green, which Cheng, mourning the losses of many friends during the AIDS epidemic, considered symbolic of spirit, serenity, and rebirth.

Cheng’s focus on the materiality of paper continued into experiments with oxidization, particularly inspired by the textures and colors of caves he had seen in Turkey. The artist submerged paper coated in iron or copper into an emersion tank he called an “alchemic garden,” which triggered a transformation of the paper’s surface, rendering it thickly textured with rust. Cheng used this material to craft wall-based collages as well as large-scale installations known as his “Alchemicals.” The Grotto (1986), the largest such work, was exhibited at New York University’s Grey Art Gallery in 1987.

Cheng's artistic career gained momentum in the late 1970s and notably in the 1980s. The Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden acquired one of Cheng's paintings in 1977, while the Everson Museum of Art and the Alternative Museum organized solo exhibitions for him in 1980 and 1983. Cheng died of chronic lung disease in 1989, at the age of 43.

Authored by Anna Lee, SAAM Curatorial Assistant for Asian American Art, 2023.