The Alcymist Painting

She was born in Beijing, China, in 1955. In 1977, she was one of the first students admitted to the Central Academy of Fine Arts in Beijing when this institution was reopened after The Cultural Revolution. In 1981, she saw an exhibition with the Norwegian painter Edvard Munch in the Chinese National Gallery in Beijing (NAMOC), and she decided to go to his homeland for further study. She applied - and was admitted to - the State Academy of Arts in Oslo, Norway, where she studied until 1987. Then she received a postgraduate scholarship at the Art Academy in Bergen, and after that another scholarship to Cité Internationale des Arts in Paris, France. This dual education, from academies in China and Europe, may explain how Western technique and Eastern thinking seem to meet and blend in her art. Mai Cheng’s largest exhibition so far took place in the Chinese National Gallery (NAMOC) in Beijing back in 1992, in the very same hall that ten years earlier had displayed the paintings by Edvard Munch. Here she showed more than a hundred large oil paintings, many of them abstract, which was unusual in China at that time. Today, her work is represented (under her Chinese name Cheng Zheng) both in China Art Association in Beijing and in the Chinese National Gallery. In all these years Mai Cheng has been working on what a critic has described as “aesthetic archaeology”, letting traces of history shine like hidden messages through the surface of each painting. Under several layers of history, there may be symbols and messages that have disappeared from all languages, remnants that seem expelled to inscriptions on rocks or in clay – signs that appear strangely powerful even though we may not be able to interpret them. “In fact, almost every type of art is based on archetypes because all humans seem to search for the same conception of beauty,” Mai Cheng explained in an interview. “Therefore, it is not only legitimate, but completely natural to combine the most primitive with the most modern of expressions.” Today, Mai Cheng has her studio in Menton, France, and her gallery in Oslo, Norway.