Light & Grain 秋麦: Michael Cherney

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. It 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.

In analog photography, time is rendered into fleeting instants—captured at the precise convergence of light and silver halide. In series such as Fan Motifs, Shadow Curtains, and Isolated Shadows, Cherney encodes the fleeting present into formats drawn from classical Chinese visual culture. Using folding screens, scrolls, and fan leaves, these works function not merely as images, but as spatial instruments of perception—structures that shape how the viewer moves through, encounters, and inhabits the act of looking. Folding Screens create layered fields of memory; hanging scrolls guide the viewer’s gaze in rhythmic intervals; fan shape compositions offer partial views between concealment and exposure. These moments, suspended within traditional formats, blur the boundary between record and fiction. The viewer is positioned on the riverbank—witnessing what passes, aware of what is no longer visible, and attuned to what is still forming.

Cherney’s practice of enlarging the details from his original negatives transforms the shifting perspectives of traditional Chinese ink painting into photographic form. Each frame is distilled to its essence, guiding the viewer toward minute, often imperceptible details. In doing so, he extends the classical principle of “seeing the grand within the small,” while opening new expressive dimensions for the photographic medium. This distinctive visual approach yields compositions that are both tightly focused and imaginatively expansive, rich in subtle textures, yet open to boundless interpretation. Within the temporal structure shaped by this exhibition, Cherney’s works bring past, present, and future into quiet convergence, allowing viewers to experience what has settled, what is unfolding, and what is still to come—all at once.