"By one Chinese view of time, the future is behind you, above you, where you cannot see it. The past is before you, below you, where you can examine it. Man's position in time is that of a person sitting beside a river, facing always downstream as he watches the water flow past."
—— Graham Peck
Fu Qiumeng Fine Art is pleased to present Light & Grain, a solo exhibition by American photographer Michael Cherney (b. 1969). The exhibition offers a focused exploration of Cherney’s distinctive photographic practice—at once a contemporary response to classical landscape aesthetics and a visual meditation on the nature of time. Over more than thirty years of living and working in China, Cherney has utilized the camera as a vessel for temporal reflection, guiding the viewer through nuanced encounters with landscape and cultural memory. This exhibition is shaped by a classical Chinese understanding of time—the past lies ahead, visible and examinable, while the future gathers behind, obscured from sight. We are positioned like a figure seated beside a river, always facing downstream, watching as the current of time slips steadily past. For Cherney, photography becomes a way to gather what is already passing—a means of holding the transient present within a fixed and visible frame. It offers a quiet act of preservation, allowing fragments of time to remain, even as they drift beyond reach.
Spanning two decades of work, the exhibition unfolds as a visual journey shaped by place, memory, and the enduring passage of time. Light & Grain will be on view from June 12 to August 23, 2025, at Fu Qiumeng Fine Art, 65 East 80th Street, New York. A public opening reception will be held on Friday, June 27, from 5 to 8 PM.
The exhibition’s title, Light & Grain, speaks to the two elemental forces at the heart of Cherney’s work.“Light” evokes the fundamental condition of photography—its reliance on illumination, clarity, and the ephemeral instant. “Grain” refers both to the photosensitive texture of analog film and to the artist’s Chinese name 秋麦 Qiumai—Mai 麦 (wheat), cultivated and ripened in Qiu 秋 (autumn), a season of transformation. These resonances run through Cherney’s work, where each image becomes not only a record of what is seen but a moment shaped by time and embedded in place. Unlike literati painting, which often imagines ideal landscapes, Cherney turns his lens toward real sites—marked by erosion, memory, and the quiet persistence of history.
In Light & Grain, Michael Cherney navigates the currents of time through three interlocking movements: Tracing Downstream, where ancient myth and contemporary terrain converge in album-like sequences; Reflections in Midstream, which transforms fleeting instants into immersive, scroll- and fan-inspired experiences; and The Unseen Upstream, a cross-cultural dialogue of calligraphy and collaborative brushwork that hints at futures beyond our view. By enlarging the subtle textures of his negatives, Cherney distills each frame to its essence—“seeing the grand within the small”—and fuses photographic rigor with the spirit of ink painting. Together, these works bring past, present, and future into quiet convergence, inviting viewers to witness time’s flowing passages, held momentarily within the stillness of the frame.
