Installation view, Light and Grain 秋麦

Light and Grain 秋麦
Closing Saturday, August 23, 2025
65 East 80th Street, NYC

These are the final days to experience Light & Grain 秋麦, a solo exhibition by American photographer Michael Cherney at Fu Qiumeng Fine Art.  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. For Cherney, photography becomes a quiet act of preservation, capturing transient moments within a fixed, visible frame.

In Light & Grain, Michael Cherney traces the flow of time through three movements: Tracing Downstream, where myth and terrain converge; Reflections in Midstream, transforming fleeting instants into scroll- and fan-inspired forms; and The Unseen Upstream, a cross-cultural dialogue of calligraphy and brushwork that gestures toward unseen futures. Enlarging the textures of his negatives, Cherney distills each frame to its essence—“seeing the grand within the small”—merging photographic precision with the spirit of ink painting. These works bring past, present, and future into quiet convergence, holding time momentarily still.

Spanning two decades of work, the exhibition unfolds as a visual journey shaped by place, memory, and the enduring passage of time. Be sure to catch Michael Cherney’s captivating works before it closes!

To learn more, click here.