Painter, Amy Cheng's current work has been inspired by six months spent in Brazil on a Fulbright Fellowship, where her senses were overtaken by the lush plant life that flourishes in its tropical clime. Chenge take natural forms and riffs on them, saturating the paintings with color, energy, pattern and light. The jewel-like quality, and shimmering details linkthe micro and the macro - mosaics, brocades and the cosmos combined. The complex layered space, concave and convex forms, decoration, transparency, and shape-shifting playfulness all conspire to seduce – the way nature seduces in order to propagate itself. Cheng paints about the irrepressible life force we encounter in nature where the physical, sensual, spiritual, cerebral, and erotic coexist in a nexus. The artist used to speculate that her love of pattern and repetition found its roots in my Asian sensibility. Now she believes that on a very basic level, the human and possibly all living organisms nervous system respond organically to pattern-making.

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