Coinciding with Asia Week New York 2022, FQM is pleased to present “Ink Affinities 墨缘: The Collaborative Works of Arnold Chang and Michael Cherney." Chang and Cherney's thirteen-year collaboration has challenged aesthetic and cultural boundaries and propelled the artists to the forefront of the Contemporary Ink Art movement. Ink Affinities, the first solo exhibition in New York to showcase the combined mediums of Chinese landscape painting and photography, reveals Chang and Cherney’s power to collapse cultural binaries by bridging Eastern and Western aesthetics. The exhibition focuses on twenty-one of the artists’ most recent works produced during the COVID-19 pandemic. The show opens on March 18th and continues through May 7th, 2022. Fu Qiumeng Fine Art is located on the ground floor, at 65 East 80th Street in Manhattan, New York City. Regular opening hours are from Tuesday through Saturday between 10 a.m. and 6 p.m. In celebration of Asia Week, we will also open on Sunday, March 20th, and Monday, March 21st.
Michael Cherney is a Jewish-American photographer who has spent most of his adult life in China. Arnold Chang is a Chinese-American ink painter of Chinese and Scottish ancestry who lives in New Jersey. While both artists come from starkly different cultural traditions, each is deeply concerned with the history of Chinese visual culture and drawn to create works rooted in the centuries-old tradition of Chinese painting.
Chang and Cherney began collaborating in 2009. Their work blurs the distinctions between photography and painting by harnessing the similarities between film grains and ink dots. This new series, neither solely photographs nor paintings but a dialogue between two artists, working in different media, embraces and reaffirms the classical aesthetics of Chinese landscape art while challenging the public's definition of shuimo 水墨 (“ink painting”).
The creative process begins with Cherney, who treks across China’s vast landscape to access sites immortalized by China’s classical landscape painters. Like the historical artists he references, Cherney works with ‘traditional’ equipment and materials. But rather than ink and brush, his tools are a Leica camera and monochrome 35 mm film. Using this earlier form of photographic technology forces him to wait until the film is developed before seeing the results. After processing the negatives, he scrutinizes each with a loupe, searching for details that warrant further exploration, and scans those excerpts. The process often reveals surprising details that passed unnoticed when he pressed the shutter. The technique, which Cherney terms "secondary memory," is perhaps best described as an editorial method of discovering elemental visual forms; those small yet significant phenomena so easily overlooked. After identifying the desired details, he crops the photographs and prints these “excerpts” onto xuan paper using pigment ink. This allows the images to be handled and mounted in the same way as traditional ink paintings. Cherney then ships the mounted images, halfway around the world, to Arnold Chang’s New Jersey studio.
By contrast, Arnold Chang works in the opposite direction. After receiving Cherney’s carefully edited excerpts, Chang creatively expands each detail with carefully chosen and sometimes novel brushwork until he achieves a harmonious composition. Key to this process is Chang’s years of landscape painting training and his corollary skill at identifying Cunfa, or “texture strokes.” Classical Chinese painters developed the Cunfa system to depict details of the natural world, particularly the distinctive features of rocks and trees. Specific brushwork techniques were formally associated with particular textures, eventually becoming a stylistic schema that the well-informed viewer might recognize, such as a “Mi-Fu” or a “Li Tang axe-cut stroke.” But rather than imitating these granular textural patterns, Chang employs complementary brushwork and sometimes develops unique techniques such as salt-painting, to respond to each excerpt. The result is a rather witty visual conversation between two diaspora artists, living on opposite sides of the planet and working in different media, who share a deep interest in traditional Chinese history and culture and a common framework of art historical references.
Each collaborative work that Arnold Chang and Michael Cherney create is unique. Some appear as an homage to the brushwork of the old masters of Chinese art history. Others are more experimental, exploring variations in Eastern and Western painting techniques and perspectives and a range of forms of artistic production and reproduction.
As two American-born artists living and working in parallel diaspora communities, Arnold Chang and Michael Cherney are simultaneously "outsiders" and "insiders" to both the American and Chinese art worlds. Perhaps a reflection of their personal struggles to reconcile identity and ethnicity, their collaborative work is a study in achieving balance; between the East and the West, the modern and the traditional, the natural and the abstract, and the original and the reproduced. By engaging these seemingly contradictory positions, Chang and Cherney invite their viewers to do the same. They invite us to transcend the historical limitations placed on what constitutes and who produces “Chinese” and “American” art and to discover a more nuanced and global perspective, where notions of being and belonging are fundamentally fluid.
Chang and Cherney’s collaborations have been exhibited internationally, including at the Metropolitan Museum of Art, the Asian Art Museum of San Francisco, the Cleveland Museum of Art, the Kalamazoo Institute of Art, the Crow Museum, the Hong Kong Museum of Art, and the UC Santa Barbara Art, Design, and Architecture Museum.
