Ching Ho Cheng's recent torn paper works are powerful, sensuous evocations of earth's ephemeral mysteries. To create these variously scaled abstract pieces (entitled Grotto), Cheng applies iron powder to torn paper which has been sealed with waterproof layers of gesso, mat medium and modelling paste employed to create a sense of relief. He uses a special catalyst to begin a lengthy chemical process of transforming the iron into rust. The paper is soaked in water for days and dried: it then becomes a hard surface. Freely controlling the process by deciding when to remove the paper from the wash, Cheng may resoak it in order to obtain the desired surface and textural coloration. He can manipulate a much more viscous surface with the smaller works and hopes to achieve a greater impasto with the larger torn paper pieces, which have a tendency to break if too heavily laden.

Cheng had begun experimenting in February 1986 with pastel earth colors applied to torn paper. He decided that the end result lacked depth and richness: "It was only colored paper." Cheng continued his quest after a trip to Mexico in June which renewed his long-standing interest in ancient cultures. Inspired by "this ancient timeless quality to the land and the ruins" subjected to the natural process of erosion, Cheng began Grotto. He worked for about three months before obtaining any results, evolving his present system through trial and error. Cheng has observed that the rust produced is ferric oxide which is used "to make a lot of the burnt siennas and earth colors. Instead of using these pigments that are already manufactured, I make it myself directly on the paper surface... It's a very natural process."

Cheng regards this transformation of iron powder into rust as an "alchemical process." Grotto is permeated with "the generative and regenerative mysteries of the earth which in ancient times people thought of as imbued in one symbol, for instance, the Great Goddess or the Great Mother." Grottos and caves are time-honored symbols of the womb of Mother Earth. This ultimate female principle is suggested in Cheng's pieces by their gestalt. Most of the works in the series, including Earth Angel, are torn in a roughly circular configuration and encompass curvilinear shaped negative spaces evoking genital forms or mouths of caves. The grotto-like character of these pieces is enhanced by their relief surfaces evoking ossified rock formations and by their usual placement directly upon a white wall which activates the positive and negative forms. Projecting slightly forward, the pieces cast shadows and possess a sculptural presence.

Cheng was involved with Abstract Expressionism in the 1960s as a student at Cooper Union. Afterwards he deliberately emptied his mind of this training in order to find his own artistic identity. From the 1970s onwards he has employed paper to create a mythopoetic art dealing with the cyclical nature of existence. The catalyst for Cheng's first torn paper pieces in 1982 was an accident. Tearing up a drawing that he did not like, Cheng suddenly saw the potential for "something new." The "something new" that Cheng developed over the next few years is represented by three earlier works in the exhibition, The Veil, The Muse and UFO (all 1986). In counterpoint to the earth-oriented Grotto, these three dissonant pieces evoke the cosmological mysteries of the heavens--the concept of "infinite, unknowable space." The Veil is a monumental black and blue piece whose title refers to God's rending of the veil covering the holiest part of the temple in Jerusalem at the moment in which Christ was crucified, opening the way for mankind's salvation. This elegiac title, suggested by a poet friend, alludes to Cheng's organic concept of death as "the physical self... going into spirit" as well as his dualistic working method. The destructive, "lightning, split-second" act of tearing paper paves the way for the creation of a work of art. Cheng's tears have split open the entire composition, creating unbridgeable rifts activated by the expanse of the white wall upon which the piece is hung. The fractured, disrupted character of the torn paper is enhanced by the inclusion of a hard edge graphite shape evocative of Cheng's interest in the archaeological fragments.

In contrast, the tears of the recent Grotto pieces, largely internalized, do not violate their integrity. The circular or oval configurations. of many of these works and their internal tears are "signs of completion," of totality. Unity is maintained even in a piece such as Grotto VII, which is composed of non-circular forms torn from two juxtaposed sheets of rectangular paper. There is no sense of forms striving for completion in this recent wall-size, bipartite piece whose richly variegated sponge-like surface--evocative of Cheng's trip to Egypt--reflects his increasing confidence and freedom with the oxidation process.

The holistic character of Grotto also derives from the provocative dualities embodied in the pieces. These works are the product of chance and deliberation, creation and destruction, and the natural and the manmade. Paper is subjected to the destructive, immediate, artificial act of tearing an then by contrast to a slow, organic gestation as the iron powder oxidizes and rust is created. The formation of rust is in itself an unpredictable, dualistic process of build up and break down. Even the title of this series evokes a dualism--a grotto can be a natural or manmade structure.

Cheng's masterful torn paper pieces defy categorization. Neither drawings, collages, paintings, nor sculptures, these pieces "exist somewhere at an intersecting point" between the four mediums. Ching Ho Cheng has truly blazed a new trail with his torn paper works in which process and metaphor mirror each other as affirmations of the transient, cyclical, creative and destructive aspects of existence.

Arts, January 1987

Later on, an airplane flight to Cairo got Cheng to thinking about the desert he saw from the sky. He didn't want to paint it; he felt an urge to make it. Consequently, he soaked rough rag paper in water for several days, adding gesso and acrylic paint to it until it was almost as hard as rock. Then he added iron or copper dust which, when reimmersed in water, respectively turns red and green.

All these developments led up to Cheng's latest one-man show titled "The Alchemical Garden." Visualizing the gallery space as a temple, the artist placed on the floor large basins of wood containing water in which he floated torn papers covered with iron dust. The mood was unbelievably quiet, and there was nothing on the walls to distract one's attention
--nothing in the gallery except basins, the slowly reddening papers and some news papers spread on the floor beneath the basins. Only the news headlines brought the thoughts of the visitor back for a moment to the realities of our tormented present--away from thoughts of eternity and the age-old transformations of nature.

About the same time as this exhibition, Cheng installed a work called The Grotto in the two large windows of NYU's Grey Art Gallery that face Washington Square Park. The Grotto consisted of seven panels across which stretched an irregular arch made out of paper reddening naturally (the arch swept across both windows). This work and the work in the gallery are both part of a series based on the Pelagian creation myth, which maintains that in the beginning there was only a mother goddess from whose womb everything tumbled: sun, moon, planets, stars and the earth, with its mountains, rivers, trees, herbs and living creatures. Cheng's interpretations reflect the elemental mystery and beauty of this myth.

Art In America, September 1988

In his tenth-floor studio, just down the hall from his apartment, Cheng allowed us to photograph him at work on the initial stages of a complicated art-making process. He has been creating a body of torn works since 1982, when, disgusted with a charcoal drawing in progress, he ripped it up. "It was as if lightning had struck," he says. "This act affirmed the creative and destructive aspects of nature." In 1984 Cheng began investing the pieces of paper with iron, and has employed this technique since that time.

After hundred-percent rag paper is torn and gessoed, he covers it with an acrylic medium, gray iron powder, and modeling paste. For two weeks he soaks the work in pools of water. The powder rusts and pigment emerges. By changing the water daily, Cheng keeps the oxidation process going and the work becomes richer in color. "Rust is ferric oxide," he explains, "among the most permanent substances in nature. The Egyptians used ferric oxide for pigment and their frescoes are as fresh today as they were when they were made."

Here Henry Geldzahler offers an appreciation of Ching Ho Cheng's unique body of work.

From the start, Ching Ho Cheng's art has been a search for evidence of connectedness: man with man, man with nature, and man with God.The proliferation of forms in his work in the sixties and early seventies was stylistically in tune with the experimentally induced hallucinations of that time. Yet there is ample confirmation of his innate gift for clarity and wholeness in even the most complex paintings of the period. In his earliest mature work, Triptych (1970-1971), and in The Astral Theater (1972), we find a technical mastery that fairly takes the breath away. The intelligence and discipline apparent in these early pieces show an artist ready to evolve in any stylistic direction he feels impelled to take.

In the work he has produced since, we can see more clearly the fundamental concerns Ching brings to his art: a non canonical obsession with "religion"; an evolving preoccupation with finding "oneness" in all this hectic barrage of modern urbanism; the excavation of "natural" from the common muddle. Not that Ching denies the gorgeousness of the skin of twentieth-century life; the visible world is his main focus. At the same time there is a depth to his work that can only be ascribed to a search for the Sublime.

To fully analyze an artist's work one must ask these questions: How does it change over time? What appears constant? This is obviously less daunting a task if one surveys the finished work of an historical figure, where early, middle, and late periods are clearly delineated. With a contemporary in full career such as Ching, I suggest that the constant in his work is a feeling of awe in the face of nature and its visual equivalents, and s sense of connectedness with forces that we do not fully understand. In the early psychedelic paintings and the later minimal works there is a common root: the artist's fascination with extreme states of perception. One can never accuse Ching of an involvement with the mundane. There is instead the need to empty his work of all social or cultural vestiges in order to cleanse perception and return it to its natural state. Ching has put it clearly: "I do not seek to apotheosize the mundane. Far from it. I simply take great pleasure in little things."

In 1983 Ching visited a clairvoyant, who told him to "wrap [him]self in a color of certainty" as a way of leaving his physical body in order to experience empty space, eternity. This came at a time of great tragedy in his personal life. He needed urgently to address questions of creation and existence in order to help him cope with personal loss in manner that slammed no doors, that didn't preclude the meta-physical, the paraphysical--the magic of being. The remarkable group of blue torn paper pieces (Blue Breaking, Blues Rock, The Certainty of Blue--all from 1984) was the response. These blue grottoes, with their overarching certainties and depth of field, grew naturally from the need to heal.

It was on a visit to Turkey in the early 1980s that Ching first became involved with the theme of the fragment versus the whole, a theme he has explored rigorously throughout this decade. The fragmented relics of the ancient world that litter the Mediterranean landscape show the pressures of time and nature on man-made forms. The natural course of growth and decay soon became an integral part of Ching's art, as he began working with oxides that literally grow and change as they interact with the paper, water and air, leaving an earthy rusty residue on the surface to remind us that Ching's art is not merely a representation of natural life, but an extension of it.

It was a vision of Ching's Grotto in the oversize windows of the Grey Art Gallery in Manhattan that shocked me into a lasting appreciation of the grandeur of his recent work and its success in stating bold and healing certainties. To quote Greg Millard in a catalogue essay on Ching's work, "The magic lies in the feeling not the technical implementation of the image... the light is alive."

Contemporanea, November/December 1988

-Ching Ho Cheng