Artist Statements
Dancing, music and Meditation
The inner impetus for my paintings, during this period of time, comes mainly from my practice of meditation and my dancing experience.
When I meditate daily, I discover that life is impermanent and dreamlike. It becomes clearer that people have the tendency to grasp perception as solid existence and form as reality; the mind is exhausted and deluded by itself. Keeping one’s mind open is the way to perceive the true face of nature. Once the mind is obscured by illusions, actions cause results which karmic seeds are creating another dream of future life.
When I am dancing, I feel the music, and my feeling is expressed by the body’s movement. When I am painting, my feeling is expressed by different colors, difference kinds of paper and different textures. Form carries my feeling; image is being perceived in different ways – it is developing and illusory, like a magic display of pure ultimate nature. It’s no longer solid. It’s personal, but it’s also universal. It’s calm and exiting. It’s the union of the ultimate and the individual experience (yoga).
With the development of painting, concepts are formed to express the openness of reality. A title is only a personal awareness of the reality. It doesn’t close the painting. The painting itself, that reflects the reality, is titleless. My painting is a very concrete procedure incorporating the awareness of the union of personal experience with the naked truth.
The combination of very elaborate Chinese traditional painting styles and abstract styles is an attempt to show how nature is perceived by other sentient beings like birds. I imagine birds reflect our environment more directly and less conceptually. It makes them more open to perceive living conditions and more flexible and adaptive to the natural environment.
Yueh-mei Cheng
Visual Chess
Paintings are the visual manifestations of the artist’s life experience and ideas. In order to create a living space on two-dimensional surface, one has to break up habitual thinking and boundary of concept. Concept forms idea of the world and restricts the world as well. Painting transcends the paradigm of time and space, and reveals the subtle reality in the illusory world.
Stimulated by a certain sensational conditions such as music, dancing, meditation, yoga, etc, freely splashing colors, leaving marks both random and insightful, an unfamiliar and mystical environment is being generated as paragon (working site) for artist to create. It is waiting for response that illuminates.
Echoing between colors and feelings, and interacting between the figurative and pictographic images, the painting is forming and expanding. It is the evolving stage that is consistently inconsistent.
In this entirely new visual environment, the painter is forced to perceive directly and cut off old habit to let the visual intelligence do its work. In the state of absorption, the painter’s imagination and free association extend towards a focal point of infinity. It is inconsistently consistent: the idea and the concrete irrationality are blending.
The combination of very elaborate painting styles and abstract background is an attempt to show how nature is perceived by other sentient beings like birds. I imagine birds reflect our environment more directly and less conceptually. It makes them more open to perceive living conditions and more flexible and adaptive to the natural environment.
Like birds, sometimes the artist is squeezed by her own imaginations.
In the end game, artist is in a bitter struggle for survival. Sometimes
in a flash of epiphany, a new space is revealed. The joy of space is
the poetic feeling that echoes the inner quality of creation. Birds can
understand it, so does the artist. In this case, painting becomes a vehicle
of seeing.
Yueh-mei Cheng