The Italian Cultural Institute of Beijing is pleased to invite you to the seminar “An Introduction to the art of Michael Cherney”, featuring a presentation by the artist himself. Renowned for his unique photographic style, Cherney’s work represents a symbol of artistic globalization, seamlessly blending cultural influences from East and West.
The event will take place on Wednesday, March 5th, at 7:00 PM, at the ICC Auditorium. The seminar will be conducted in English with Chinese translation.
Michael Cherney
Michael Cherney studied Chinese language and history at the State University of New York at Binghamton, followed by graduate language study at Beijing Language Institute. A self- taught photographer, Cherney’s formal studies, combined with his rigorous personal studies of China’s art historical past, have resulted in his abiding appreciation and even reverence for China’s rich history and painting tradition, particularly landscape painting. His relationship with China has been deepened by his residence in Beijing for three decades along with his extensive travel throughout China, seeking out the specific sites that have historical relevance to his work. He has described his art as a way “to look upon a place imbued with a vast accumulation of history and cultural memory, and then to capture one instant, fleeting, tangible moment of it with a photograph.”
Cherney’s photography is an art of boundaries; of masking and enlarging the image. It is an art that challenges the viewing audience to imagine what hovers just beyond the immediately visible. His final presentation is a modern elaboration of traditional formatting: books or albums, hanging scrolls, handscrolls, large-scale screens, round and folding fan shapes. By this presentation, modern photography becomes a natural extension of premodern media, and Cherney’s art becomes a meditation on the long history of Chinese visual art.
Cherney’s works were the first photographic works ever to enter the collection of the Metropolitan Museum of Art’s Department of Asian Art and are in the permanent collections of many other museums as well, including Cleveland Museum of Art, Nelson Atkins Museum of Art, Getty Research Institute, Art Institute of Chicago, Harvard University Art Museum, Yale University Art Gallery, Los Angeles County Museum of Art, Peabody Essex Museum, Portland Art Museum, Saint Louis Art Museum, Santa Barbara Museum of Art, the Berkeley Art Museum / Pacific Film Archive, Middlebury College Museum of Art, among others. His monumental Ten Thousand Li of the Yangtze—a series of 42 handscrolls created by photographing along the length of the Yangtze River between 2010-2015—was recently acquired by the Princeton University Art Museum as part of their permanent collection.
Find more information about Qiu Mai’s art here: www.qiumai.net