Chung-Ping Cheng revels in light, color, and texture. Her photographic images are vibrant with all three. Her current artwork consists of primarily floral images, but Cheng wants her viewers to know that “The theme of my work, although most are flowers, is that they are not only beautiful as we see them, but that they have significance as related to life, to feminity.” In short, to Cheng, her flowers are a force of nature.
Her blossoming images feature an intense and intimate color palette that Cheng carefully selects. “It depends on the subject of the work, the palette that I choose,” she says, noting that her palette also depends on not just what the subject is, but whether it is “representational or metaphorical, somber or happy, whether the image is of something brilliant.” According to Cheng, “I think the color palette comes from my aesthetic both in the West and East.” Certainly the fluidity and the natural vibrancy of her colors reflect that universal spirit.
The riveting lushness of Cheng’s current series mark a new direction for the artist’s work. “My latest work is a new direction, more of the experience of occurrences in a cycle images impart.” If the viewer studies them long enough, they are like taking a deep dive from the minute petaled perfection of a single blossom into a hidden universe. There is a strong life-force present in her work.
Vibrating with life, highly visceral, yet delicate – both in her current floral works and in a previous rich-looking cake series, too, among others, each of Cheng’s works somehow manage to be both exuberant and graceful. She says that this combination of visual style is “intrinsic,” and that she is not sure how the composition asserts itself, it just happens for her artistically, a natural conception of the image.
Of her past “Cake” series, Cheng says that she created it in part “because I love sweets, and I think that they should bring people pleasure not only in taste but also in sight.” Her floral works she approaches as a richly pleasurable experience, but an experience that is also reverant as well. For Cheng, these flowers are jewels, sparkling with light, and revealing many prisms of natural beauty.
Living in Los Angeles has broadened both her ability to reach an appreciative audience and her own perspective; but her work process remains rooted in film rather than in the digital age so much of Los Angeles represents and embraces. There is nothing immediate about her act of creation, and she likes it that way. “Although its digital era, I still like working with a traditional camera and film. I shoot with a medium format camera and film, and print my work myself in the darkroom.”
Returning to the meaning within her current floral series, the idea of rebirth and spirituality is strong for the artist in regard to the lotus flower. She introduces these concepts seemingly effortlessly into her work. “The lotus is an iconic flower in Chinese culture. It has a meaning of purity, it’s very strong in spirituality.”
She adds that in the latest images from this series, the palette is a sunshine yellow and flame red. “The image is yellow with a little red, like a refining fire. It is thought that those colors make a person restore, confirm, strengthen and establish themselves.” The idea of a refining fire, she explains, extends to the creation of beautiful jewelry, as well as for people. That refinement is a process uses in creating fine jewelry as well, and ties into Cheng’s idea of the flower itself as a jewel.
Certainly each of Cheng’s images are jewel-like: a prism of perfection that radiates both beauty and strength. Dive in.
- Genie Davis; photos provided by the artist