www.amychengstudio.com
Fulbright to China 2017

Purchase instructions: email info@fulbright.org with artist name & details of art piece

THE MANDALA SERIES
Sumptuous, intricate, ornamented, the oil paintings are richly referential — they call to mind a range of associations from mandalas, the cosmos, cells, lace, brocade and ore. I align myself with the long tradition of geometric and floral ornamentation the Far Eastern, Middle Eastern, and European craftsmen have long employed. They did so with the implicit understanding that pattern and repetition, which are endemic in nature, are primal in their rhythmic connection to the human nervous system. I identify my work with the long tradition of visual artists interested in notions of cosmology. I am, as my friend the artist Thomas Lyon Mills says, painting worlds within worlds with the aim of revealing profound, contemplative, slow truths.

THE ABSTRACT GEOMETRIC DRAWINGS
The drawings in this series share an interest in spatial illusion, intricacy, geometry, cross-hatching and implied movement. They are often playfully quirky, at times mildly psychedelic. They offer close up views of worlds that seem to reference things like architecture, landscape, pathways, outer space. Each represents a unified world with its own internal logic that abides by the natural laws we recognize, such as the existence of light, perspective (even if skewed), gravity (air vs. ground), flat vs. 3-D. They are neither purely abstract, nor strictly representational, but hover somewhere between the two. Generally, there is a strong sense of implied movement stilled in space