ABOUT

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BIOGRAPHY

Chung-Ping Cheng graduated from National Taiwan University, where she majored in History. She moved to Los Angeles in year 2000. In the U.S., she took intensive art and photography courses, pursuing her interest in art and photography. Cheng is among a new wave of Chinese photographers to re-introduce aspects of China’s considerable aesthetic heritage within contemporary photography. Cheng’s work was included most recently in LA Art Show, presented by Los Angeles Art Association, and Solo Exhibitions at the 1839 Contemporary Gallery in Taiwan, Shoebox Projects , TAG Gallery and Moorpark College Art Gallery in Los Angeles.

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I seek to synthesize aspects of my Chinese heritage with an attentiveness to rejecting
expectations. Informed by 10 years experience in Chinese Painting, I am more interested in
creating images that are the product of the process of studying image making, than exemplifying
the status quo of photography. Inspired by the individualism and bravery of artists Georgia
O’keefe and Diane Arbus, my photographic practice focuses on process, repetition and
experimentation in the darkroom, more than any one genre of photography. I express my inner
self through photography, all my trials and tribulations, the cycle of emotions and experiences
that I have as an outsider.

Although we are in the digital era, where one can take thousands of pictures, have the images
appear immediately, fast and economically, I am more old school. I use color film, a medium
format camera and develop my large-scale images myself in the darkroom, which enables me to
create the color and to experiment through small variations. I relish the mysteries of the
developing photograph while embracing and using the elements of chance that appear.
I focus on capturing Peonies and Lotuses because of their iconic cultural representation as
metaphors for the life cycle. Peonies symbolize wealth and prosperity, as well as female beauty;
while the Lotus symbolizes purity, enlightenment, rebirth and resurrection, since it roots in
muddy water from which it rises. I shoot these symbolic flowers repetitiously over several
seasons as they bloom and eventually wither and die, amplifying the inevitable process of
growth and change.

My most recent series encapsulates my process oriented experimental photography. “Refining
Fire/Undescribed Variations” is large -scale and has intense, highly saturated colors such as a
golden yellow, fiery magenta and a deep, rich Prussian blue. In this body of work, there are
mirror image diptychs with the negative and the positive image of the same shot next to each
other. There are also serial images of the same composition – like Monet’s haystacks. The color
sensation intentionally overwhelms the specific imagery of the flower, moving the photographs
from realism into an emotive abstraction. Compositionally, the flowers – like in Georgia
O’Keefe’s flower painting -- are enlarged to take over the whole surface and thus become more
powerful, bold and less traditional, still beautiful but no longer fragile.