Yueh-mei Cheng is the studio art professor of International School of Art and Design at Finlandia University in Michigan and visiting professional faculty of The Frank Lloyd Wright School of Architecture.

"The soul of my painting resides in the interplay of invention with my personal journey of cultural transition. Its outer form is rooted in an Asian tradition and is used as a metaphor where I and my audience can become one with Nature. When the outer shell becomes too rigid, my art must escape. When I was introduced to Western art, the inherent free spirit of my art broke through and a glorious evolution naturally occurred. I see this as a transitional state which seems to mirror my multi-cultural emergence.

The inner impetus for my painting comes mainly from my practice of meditation and my dancing experience. When I am dancing, I feel the music, and my feeling is expressed by the body’s movement. When I am painting, my feeling is expressed by different colors, different kinds of paper and different textures. Form carries my feeling; image is being perceived in different ways – it is developing and illusory, like a magic display of pure ultimate nature. It is no longer solid. It is personal, but it is also universal. It is calm and exciting. It is the union of the ultimate and the individual experience.

For me, making art is a process of observation and meditation. Observing and perceiving to penetrate inner nature of things, and contemplating with vitality and feeling until the object and subject become inseparable. Rooted in earth and reflected from life, transformation and invention from memory reaches the clarity of artistic level. The technique and skill become the unique artistic language. Myself and media, mind and material, the subjective and the objective are interacting and penetrating. Through constant self-refining and struggling, I test and stretch the boundaries of painting. Time, space and personal poetic feeling expands to another dimension. The creative impetus invokes an unknown world in which the painting becomes a vehicle of seeing: colors and strokes stir imagination and its pure nature bestows life into abstractive symbolic form, dancing into the space one after another. It’s a magic display. The essence of art is thus realizing.

With the development of contemporary art and cross-cultural awareness, my painting concepts are formed into a new phase to express the openness of reality. It never closes to a certain meaning; rather it’s an open window to invite the audience into living spaces within which his/her own imagination becomes a part of the painting".

www.chineseartnet.com/YMC/