Emily SyCip Cheng: Ventures and vision

MANILA, Philippines - Emily SyCip Cheng is an international artist known for her vibrant paintings enriched with story-imbued details. Though born and based in New York, her Filipino-Chinese heritage has connected her with the Philippines. She has had two successful exhibitions in the country, in Galleria Duemila and Ayala Museum, during which she gave lectures on art and her process. In 2008, she visited the country once again to share her book, Emily Cheng — Chasing Clouds, published in New York and launched locally in Powerbooks, Greenbelt. 

Emily’s artistic journey has led her to explore a variety of techniques and media, engaging her viewers with thoughts, ideas, and information put together in delicious colors and breathtaking compositions that take them away from their mundane existence. If one were to observe a consistent pattern in her work, it would be drawing the viewer’s attention towards minutiae that are visually and historically rich, yet might have been otherwise overlooked.

Enter the current chapter of Emily’s creative process and we encounter a solo exhibition at the Maison Louis Vuitton, Hong Kong, ongoing until March 2010.

Prior to setting up her Hong Kong exhibit, she curated an intriguing exhibition with Michelle Loh entitled “Eye World” at Triple Candle, New York. This exhibit comprises archival drawers topped with glass museum cases displaying various curios, compositions and art objects from multiple individuals.

The designated spaces of the exhibitors fall within these drawers while the enclosures above grant the audience a clue to their contents. Whether these objects are confined, concealed or unveiled is left to the viewer’s discretion under a premise of intimacy and discernment. This innovative presentation offers us a respite from the otherwise frenzied pace of this modern world. 

The exhibition notes by the curators state:

“Drawers accumulate objects. We use them in our homes and offices to store, file, or hide our messy lives. Rummaging through them can yield unexpected discoveries — objects that are markers of ourselves at different times or under different circumstances. While most drawers hold personal memories, the cabinet in this room had a more public purpose. Inherited from the Museum of the American Indian, it was designed to preserve and display archeological specimens. The individually labeled drawers held arrowheads and other artifacts that had been removed from their original sites and organized scientifically by tribe and object type. Scholars used them to compile data and form theories. For scientists and the public alike, the contents of these drawers were used to make sense of the world.

“When invited to curate an exhibition for Triple Candle using this museum case, with its 72 drawers, we set out to explore how creative people from various professions — artists, curators, writers, architects, and others — might represent something as vast and unknowable as the world, with all its systems and structures, in the confines of a single drawer. How have travel, our personal interests, and the media informed how we see and think of the world? What objects, images, symbols, maps, photos or shapes would one choose to represent it?

“The contents of each drawer range from the grand to the personal, from the factual to the metaphoric, from visual puns to diagrams, paintings and sculptures. The top of the cabinet contains objects that relate to each of the drawers — Ambassadors, if you will. The Ambassadors are arranged according to similar object type and/or characteristics to create a dialog of like specimens in keeping with the spirit of the historical museum case.”

Emily Cheng lives and works in New York. She constantly travels around the world to do art exhibits and lectures.