One would be hard-pressed to find a ‘more Chinese’ artist than Qiu Mai. Photographer, calligrapher, and book artist, Qiu Mai’s work is done with the great sophistication that draws on the subtleties of China’s most scholarly and esoteric traditions. Based in Beijing and a successful artist whose works have been collected by The Metropolitan Museum of Art’s Department of Asian Art (the first photographic works ever to enter the collection of that department), Qiu Mai’s art is less provocative than it is intellectually engaging, meditative, and often simply beautiful. What is provocative is his identity: Qiu Mai is the Chinese name for Michael Cherney, born in New York of Jewish parentage. Cherney’s work is the cutting-edge demonstration of artistic globalization: if Asian artists can so readily ‘come West’, then what is to prevent large numbers of future Western artists from ‘going Asian’? Or, like Qiu Mai/Michael Cherney, going both ways at once, both American and Chinese, modern and traditional.
Jerome Silbergeld, P. Y. and Kinmay W. Tang Professor of Chinese Art History, Princeton University
Works can be found in the permanent collection of the following institutions:
The Metropolitan Museum of Art
Cleveland Museum of Art
Getty Research Institute
Peabody Essex Museum
P. Y. and Kinmay W. Tang Center for East Asian Art, Princeton University
Princeton University Art Museum
Arthur M. Sackler Museum, Harvard University Art Museums
Santa Barbara Museum of Art
Berkeley Art Museum / Pacific Film Archive
Yale University Art Gallery
Middlebury College Museum of Art
Wellin Museum of Art, Hamilton College
Mandeville Special Collections Library, University of California at San Diego
Los Angeles County Museum of Art
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