High Noon

“Light is the most awesome symbol of the Order of the Universe. Nothing can beat the speed of light. When I paint light I’m not just concerned with the phenomenon of light, I am trying to depict the illumination. The light will continue. It is eternal.” —Ching Ho Cheng Ching Ho Cheng painted High Noon while living in the Chelsea Hotel, a celebrated New York City residence for artists and other creative people, where he rented a small one-bedroom apartment as his studio. The apartment had southern exposure and at midday the sun would cast brilliant light on the painted apartment walls. In the early 1980s, Cheng produced a series of gouache paintings of luminous sunlight reflected through the windows of his apartment. While the painting can be read as abstract, it is more clearly a representation of a window frame, a refined distillation that didn’t depict the source of light, but rather the ephemeral effects of light and its corresponding shadows. Here, reality and illusion are harmonized and become a single entity, an evocation of sheer immateriality.