Landscape Relativities: The Collaborative Works of Arnold Chang and Michael Cherney
On view February 25-June 25, 2017 at the Crow Museum of Asian Art
The collaborative works of painter Arnold Chang (Zhang Hong 張洪; b. 1954) and photographer Michael Cherney (Qiu Mai 秋麥; b. 1969) stretch and play with the relationship between the two media of painting and photography and the history and principles of Chinese ink painting.
As a New Yorker living in China (Cherney) and as a Chinese-American living in the U.S. (Chang), the artists are engaged in a lively dialogue while practicing within Chinese and Western artistic modes, challenging categorizations of Chinese and American art and identity in today’s increasingly globalized world.
Cherney travels throughout the world photographing myriad subjects, including landscapes. He chooses excerpts from his film photography and uses an inkjet printer to transfer and embed them onto blank sheets of textured paper to send on to Chang. Upon receipt, Chang sits with each sheet, not knowing where the excerpts are from, and expands the photographic images into larger landscapes with brush and ink. The resulting works are sometimes based on an instant association with a historical Chinese painting; at other times they are based purely on imagination. Their shared process and works, which juxtapose notions of fast and slow and of real and imagined, illuminate how technology continues to change our ways of seeing.
This exhibition, which features a selection of both their individual and collaborative works, considers conceptual and philosophical ideas of representation, and also materiality: the graininess or smoothness of the paper, the juxtaposition of paper upon paper, the ghostliness of ink and collage. The object labels are a continuation of their artistic dialogue, reflective of their ongoing creative and collaborative process. Individually and together, their works are distinctive in the way that perspective is constantly challenged through the medium of ink, whether printed or by hand. Viewers must piece together what they are seeing—is it a photo, is it a painting, or is it both?
Landscape Relativities: The Collaborative Works of Arnold Chang and Michael Cherney is organized by the Crow Museum of Asian Art and curated by Jacqueline Chao.
Header Image: Michael Cherney and Arnold Chang. Photo by Turk Studio.
Installation photography by Chad Redmon, Courtesy of the Crow Museum of Asian Art. Artist Conversation photography by Turk Studio.
