The special pull-out print that accompanies the Summer 2023 “Icons” issue of Art in America features o:nyõ’hsowa:nẽh gowa (Great Pumpkin), a painting that Jemison made around 1974. Below, the artist tells A.i.A. about the context in which it was conjured—and how the work wound up in parts unknown.

As told to A.i.A. In 1971 I got invited to be in an exhibition at what was then known as the Museum of the American Indian [before it changed to the Smithsonian’s National Museum of the American Indian] in New York. It was the first time I showed with other Native artists. Around then, I was just beginning to search for more about my identity. I grew up in an all-Seneca community, but there wasn’t a lot of what I would call “cultural immersion” then.  

I’d just started a job as a counselor for children who had attention-deficit disorder. The kids would get a timeout period during the day, and I started spending a lot more time outdoors with them. I started to really look at the natural world for patterns and ideas for my work as I was contextualizing it within our cultural traditions. 

I was looking at trees and how they had influenced our way of life. Before the first trade occurred, everything we used had to be made. We manufactured our own cooking pots, our own tools, our own utensils. I was learning about all of that, but more in the form of reading than through active participation. 

The next step was to spend time meeting people in my community who I had known but hadn’t seen in quite some time. I also began to exhibit with other Native artists on a regular basis. Actually, there was an article in Art in America in 1972 by Lloyd Oxendine, who wrote about 23 contemporary Native artists. The Today Show interviewed him about the article, and we did an exhibition at the Brooklyn Museum [“Native North American Art: Contemporary Works by American Indian Artists”] that year too. That all pushed me to really look at the kind of iconography that I wanted in my artwork and that spoke to my identity. 

My painting o:nyõ’hsowa:nẽh gowa (Great Pumpkin) falls right at the nexus of me revisiting questions like: Who am I? What are the traditions that I come from? What does it mean to be a contemporary Seneca? What are our issues and concerns? In the Seneca language we have this phrase Jõhe’hgõh, which means “the foods that sustain us.” There are three primary foods that we raised to be the source of our sustenance: corn, beans, and squash. The pumpkin is a squash, and it’s one of those vegetables that can be stored and then used during long winter months. 

The background of the painting represents tree bark, but it’s painted in an abstract manner with colors that would not be present in an actual tree. I wanted to create the illusion of a three-dimensional object on a flat surface. Rendering what in reality is heavily textured as flat makes for a kind of breakdown of the picture plane.

This work was stolen after an exhibition at the American Indian Community House Gallery in New York City in 1983. There was a break-in, and they stole o:nyõ’hsowa:nẽh gowa (Great Pumpkin) and another painting of mine, both of which I never recovered. A friend of mine actually found the paintings after they were stolen; there was a guy trying to sell them down on Canal Street. They wound up getting confiscated by the New York City police, and I went to the station house in Tribeca and identified the paintings as mine. It was like a scene out of Barney Miller: I’m standing in the middle of the police station, and every cop that comes in says, “Who’s the ahhhtist? Are you the ahhhtist?” The next guy comes in and asks the same question.

So I’m thinking, I’m going to get these back! But the police took them to where they took stolen material. I can’t recall if it was Long Island City or Rikers Island, but, in any case, I went and tried to go through the process to recover them. When I got there and asked, a guy looked at me and said, “Do you see this warehouse? Do you think you could find them here?” I walked away shaking my head.  

It’s a peculiar statement that accords her rejected lover the motivating agency in her own self-discovery. And it’s unsupported by any careful reading of the rest of the book, which paints a clear-eyed picture of the world’s most renowned artist at the height of his fame, but also a vivid self-portrait of an inexperienced young woman from a privileged background—she was just 21 when she met the Spanish painter, who was 40 years her elder—who nonetheless had the sharpness of perception and toughness of spirit to enter an inherently unequal relationship without sacrificing her identity to it. I suspect that Gilot’s survival instinct was just as inherent as her sense of self. And survive she did: when she died this past June, she was 101.

Early on, Gilot experimented with abstraction but then seems to have accepted Picasso’s dismissal of abstract painting as merely a “kind of invertebrate, unformulated interior dream.” In any case, her paintings up through the 1960s are primarily representational—and, as with many French painters of her generation, they show the strong imprint of Picasso’s influence.

Later she began to alternate between imagistic and nonobjective modes, though she always attributed autobiographical content to her abstract works. In writing about her 1979–80 composition The Hawthorne, Garden of Another Time, a luminous arrangement of flat, clearly demarcated color forms, she described it as embodying “the recollection of looking toward my paternal grandmother’s garden in Neuilly”—the affluent Paris suburb where she was born in 1921—“through the red stained-glass windows of the billiard room on the second floor.” Distilling her memories and perceptions into abstract form, she often secreted fragments of imagery within her works, blurring the distinction. Still, it can be argued that it was in her efforts toward abstraction that Gilot achieved her true independence as an artist. There, she was free to use color, as she said, “to exaggerate, to go beyond, to pursue the extreme limit of what is suggested by the pictorial imagination.”

She also achieved double-barreled success, as both a painter and a writer: Though academic attention to her career has been scarce, her exhibitions were legion, and in 2021 a couple of her paintings sold for $1.3 million each through Sotheby’s and Christie’s. Her book Life with Picasso sold millions of copies worldwide and was succeeded by Matisse and Picasso: A Friendship in Art (1990) and the autobiographical Interface: The Painter and the Mask (1983).

In 1970 she married Jonas Salk, the American inventor of the polio vaccine, and began living for part of each year in La Jolla, California; she taught each summer between 1976 and 1983 at the University of Southern California. Following Salk’s death in 1995, she left California for the Upper West Side of New York.

Having learned from Picasso what she could, Gilot went her own way with equanimity, and without apparent bitterness. How many of us could do the same? The Guardian recently published a takedown of the “blatant sexism” of the obituary headlines for Gilot, which never failed to mention Picasso (e.g., the New York Times: “Françoise Gilot, Artist in the Shadow of Picasso, Is Dead at 101”). Guardian writer Katy Hessel asks, “does his name really have to be mentioned? Aren’t her career, her achievements, her name, enough to stand on their own?”

One retort would be that Gilot herself never believed that she had to sever her name from that of her former lover. Aside from writing two books about him, she was happy to exhibit her own work at the Musée Picasso in Antibes in 1987, and then in 2012 to cocurate a his-and-hers show of their work at Gagosian gallery in New York. So the answer is: yes, you do need to mention Picasso to understand Gilot, and that was something she was never ashamed of. Just don’t call her his “muse,” as did the Washington Post, among others. From the beginning, Gilot met Picasso as a fellow practitioner and not just the object of his adoring gaze.

It’s notable that the Brooklyn Museum’s exhibition “It’s Pablo-matic: Picasso According to Hannah Gadsby,” while claiming to present a feminist riposte to the artist’s well-known misogyny, has no room for the works of either of the women artists who knew him best, Gilot and Dora Maar. The show’s organizers might have discovered that Gilot knew better than most how to get over his arrogant brutality without neglecting everything in his work that’s so useful to other artists.  

One must tread lightly around Humeau’s latest work, which is titled Orisons and located in the San Luis Valley. Nestled under a big sky, the work extends further than the eye can see, spanning 160 acres. More than 80 small, kinetic sculptures are scattered about, many of them just over a foot tall. Visitors must remain attentive so as not to miss, or bump into, these sculptures—and, so as not to step into one of the numerous ankle-deep kangaroo mouse holes that litter the landscape.

Humeau deliberately cultivated this kind of attentiveness, asking you to think carefully about where you step. There is significant distance between the sparsely populated sculptures, and visitors, as they search for these works, are asked to bring the same reverence to both the artworks and the land. In fact, Humeau insists that “the land is the artwork,” adding that it’s a work about “transience and resilience, life and death,” as well as “coming from and returning to dust.”

Orisons is not the kind of monumental intervention into the earth that typifies the Land art genre—think Michael Heizer’s vast and newly completed City, or Robert Smithson’s iconic Spiral Jetty, which has jutted into Utah’s Great Salt Lake since 1970. Pulling up to the site, or looking at photos of Orisons, one might wonder what the artwork is, exactly. When we spoke, Humeau wagered convincingly that “perhaps the lighter touch is the more impactful touch.” Her piece is on view until June 30, 2025, rather than indefinitely, as is the case with other earthworks.

Humeau’s is a work staunchly uninterested in controlling or dominating the landscape. It is bent instead toward cultivating appreciation for what came before. Piles of bricks that Humeau calls “benches” are scattered throughout, and though they don’t look much like seating, they are clearly the most hospitable place for rest and contemplation.

The site also features several stunning hammocks that invite the viewer to commune with the land. Ropey nets are anchored by sculptural steaks that culminate in sweet heart shapes. They’re painted in blues and pinks that blend in with the sky at golden hour, but they’re also punctuated with splashes of high visibility orange to catch the meandering eye. The hammocks are intended, the artist says, to enable you to hover over the land like a bird.

On a tour at the opening, Humeau also took visitors into an abandoned cattle pen. It was already on site when she arrived, and she considers it part of the project. She asked us to sit low and assume the vantage of the cows that once populated the land, an unfarmable plot currently owned by a family of organic potato farmers.

Walking about, visitors might encounter the bones of a cow or a tomb Humeau made for a dead bird she found on the property. It occurred to me that this is not normal human behavior, to pay respect to birds and cows, but it really ought to be. By the time you read this, those corpses may already be gone with the wind, which blasts intensely in the arid, high-altitude San Luis Valley.

The wind, Humeau pointed out, has carried ancient sand to and from this valley for thousands of years, dropping it off at North America’s tallest dunes, which are visible on the horizon from the hammocks. These majestic, massive dunes are easily mistakable for mountains.

Humeau, who was born in France and is now based in London, worked on the project with the Black Cube Nomadic Art Museum, which is headquartered in Denver and commissions site-specific works like Orisons. The museum enabled her to spend time in the valley over the past three years, where she enlisted collaborators to explore what exactly came before. These include conservationists, historians, ornithologists, indigenous communities, and geomancers. That latter term describes clairvoyants who read landscapes like palms, or as the artist says, “they can see the landscape past, present, and future.”

The three geomancers independently sensed a 150-year-old sadness on the property, in the lot’s northwest corner, where a jumbled wire fence lies in chaotic disarray. There, they say, a woman is trapped. Her family tried to settle the land in 1850, but in the process, she passed away, likely at the hands of the harsh climate.

Worried about the trapped woman, Humeau wanted to give her a gift. So she planted divination instruments that only spin at very high winds. “Maybe when a storm comes they will spin,” she told me, “and she will be set free.”

Before she began the project, Humeau thought it important to speak with local indigenous communities, who consider several sites in the region sacred. Eventually, Black Cube’s leadership introduced her to a member of the Ute Mountain Ute Tribe of Towaoc named Regina Lopez Whiteskunk, and they discussed both mourning the land and the weight of history. Whiteskunk told Humeau that “to move the Earth is to release the trauma.” The artist asked Whiteskunk if she wanted to contribute, and before production began, Whiteskunk blessed the land as her father played the flute.

Orisons is a significant departure for the artist, who was included in the most recent Venice Biennale, where she showed stunning, gorgeous, and permanent sculptures concerned with speculative and extinct ecosystems. But now, instead of imagining the world before and after humans, she is grappling with the fraught ways our species occupies this planet—the imperfect ways we cohabitate with other forces and beings. It’s not just a departure, but a whole new theory of art, one suited for these end times. “I’m pretty convinced that the future of art is not about new things, but about designation and poetry,” Humeau said, adding, “Maybe we can use poetry to acknowledge the presence of what is already here.”

Suzanne Jackson cultivated the talent of other Black artists with her Gallery 32 in the 1960s, and her own abstract paintings contain oblique references to the painful history of the American South. Cameron Rowland’s conceptual practice is a means for enacting reparations. For filmmaker Trinh T. Minh-ha, as Tausif Noor writes, “the idea of the personal-as-political is not a mere catchphrase but a philosophy of existing in a world defined by colonialism, imperialism, and military occupation.” Ed Ruscha, for his part, “doesn’t shy away from talking about commercial vernacular,” as fellow artist Dena Yago told us, while discussing how such vernacular “governs our lives as the substrate of capitalism.” In Yvonne Rainer’s work as a dancer and choreographer, A.i.A. senior editor Emily Watlington discovered an early foray into disability art. And G. Peter Jemison, whose work features in a special pull-out print in this issue, figures in the significant history of Native American art.

All these iconic artists are future-facing, but an icon of the past looms large in this issue. In our “Syllabus” feature, we offer a required-reading list devoted to none other than Pablo Picasso. This year marks the 50th anniversary of his death, and Picasso turns up again in our reviews section, where A.i.A. contributor Alex Greenberger takes on the controversial “It’s Pablo-Matic,” a Brooklyn Museum exhibition co-curated by a standup comedian that attempts to reassess the painter in light of feminism. Picasso makes yet another appearance in our “Appreciation” piece: Barry Schwabsky’s obituary for Françoise Gilot, the painter and Picasso wife/muse whose pointed memoir revealed the dark side of genius. When I interviewed Suzanne Jackson in her studio in Savannah, she described meeting Gilot when she went to teach in Idyllwild, California. Gilot was on her way out, Jackson was on her way in.

FEATURES

Don’t Call It a Comeback
Back in the spotlight, Suzanne Jackson is pushing the boundaries of what paint can do.
by Sarah Douglas

Undancerly Body
For Yvonne Rainer, who rewrote the history of dance to make space for her misfit physique, everything is a performance if someone is watching.
by Emily Watlington

Two to Tango
Trinh T. Minh-ha’s twofold commitment to film reveals worlds open for discovery.
by Tausif Noor

Rethinking Reparations
Enigmatic conceptualist Cameron Rowland takes financial systems as a medium, exposing institutions that continue to profit from slavery.
by Zoé Samudzi

The Ruscha Effect
Artists weigh in on the impact of the great Ed Ruscha.
by the Editors of A.i.A.

The Underground Museum
Kenyan architects imagine an indigenous museum model unique to Africa.
by Simon Wu

G. Peter Jemison
The Native American artist talks about connecting with his heritage and a work lost to time. A special pull-out print accompanies the article.

DEPARTMENTS

Datebook
A highly discerning list of things to experience over the next three months.
by the Editors of A.i.A.

Issues & Commentary
As the world of tech shows its bad side, some of the best art/tech artists are logging off.
by Emily Watlington

Battle Royale
Marfa vs. Naoshima—art pilgrimage sites face off.
by the Editors of A.i.A.

Syllabus
A reading list for a crash course on Picasso.
by Alex Greenberger

Inquiry
A Q&A with Pippa Garner about hacking old cars and herself.
by Emily Watlington

Sightlines
Multivalent musician ANOHNI tells us what she likes.
by Francesca Aton

Hard Truths
A nonprofit director and an artist ask for advice. Plus, an interactive quiz.
by Chen & Lampert

Appreciation
A tribute to Françoise Gilot, the artist and author of Life with Picasso.
by Barry Schwabsky

New Talent
Chiffon Thomas crafts new forms from old structures.
by Logan Lockner

Book Review
A reading of Prudence Peiffer’s The Slip: The New York City Street That Changed American Art Forever.
by Walker Downey

Object Lesson
An annotation of Jesse Homer Smith’s City at Rest.
by Francesca Aton

Cover Artist
Suzanne Jackson talks about her drawing featured on the front of A.i.A.

REVIEWS

New York
New York Diary
by Alex Greenberger

Miami
“Lonnie Holley: If You Really Knew”
by Monica Uszerowicz

St. Louis
“African Modernism in America, 1947–67”
by Merve Fejzula

San Francisco
“Kehinde Wiley: An Archaeology of Silence”
by Harley Wong

Riehen, Switzerland
“Doris Salcedo”
by Maximilíano Durón

St. Louis
“Monet/Mitchell: Painting the French Landscape”
by Emily Watlington

Speaking on Zoom, I asked Critchlow how she feels about being part of the new wave of figurative painting that’s swept the art world over the last few years, and her response was telling: She doesn’t deny that her work is figurative—how could she?—but she says her deep interest is not there so much as in the materials and techniques of painting. Can she really be such a formalist, or is she being evasive? After all, her fantasy portraits of young, bare-breasted Black women are not exactly neutral subjects: imagine something like a collaboration between Lynette Yiadom-Boakye and Lisa Yuskavage, but at a Giorgio Morandi scale. Drawn, in a far from literal way, from sources ranging from classical European painting and her own ongoing practice of life drawing to 1960s soft porn and contemporary music videos, and not-so-contemporary ones, too, like PJ Harvey’s “C’mon Billy” (1995), Critchlow’s works seem calculated to elicit strong reactions. They test viewers’ visceral feelings about female sexuality, Blackness, and what happens when they intersect. Things can get uneasy. She once told an interviewer that “with femininity you can’t get it right.” Her work reflects an equanimity with that conundrum.

For what it’s worth, I’m willing to believe the smiling, ingenuous-looking young woman I see on the screen really is unconcerned about how others might react to her provocative images. She’s so clearly absorbed in her own self-exploration by way of the language of painting—not formalism, but form as a metaphor for the self. The critic Johanna Fateman once put it beautifully: Critchlow’s figures, she said, “seem to fix their dispassionate gazes beyond the sexualized tropes that frame them.” The results are often poignant, sometimes ironic, always honest in their willingness to go where the inherent and undemonstrative sensuality of her paint seems to lead.

The paintings exude an unmistakable intimacy. That’s partly to do with the modest size of most of her works: When she mentioned she’d done some bigger paintings for the New York show, I asked how large, curious about what sounded like a significant shift in the work, and she admitted, “well, medium-scale.” The intimacy owes perhaps as well to her muted palette, dominated by the myriad browns she uses to describe, not only her characters’ flesh, but much of their surroundings; above all, it derives from the delicacy of touch that she brings to the canvas. And although there is a surprising strain of traditionalism in her approach to painting, perhaps a reflection of her postgraduate training at London’s Royal Drawing School, she is no more constrained by any sort of academicism than she is tempted by the overt sociopolitical messaging that engages many of the other figurative painters in the spotlight today. Her art is finding out who she is and what she can do through painting.

Lately, Lee has found herself less interested in keeping up with gadgetry. “Now my tastes are more—how would you say it—vanilla-ish,” she confessed. Still, her sculptures, which make prominent use of disused wiring, motors, and other technological innards, are very much entangled with the devices she knew and loved long ago, as well as with works of Japanese anime like Ghost in the Shell and Evangelion that she watched as a kid. Many of Lee’s sculptures resemble such films’ cyborgs, whose bodies are not unlike the machines that created them. In Vienna, where she remained after grad school, she realized her work had a lot in common with American sci-fi films like Blade Runner too.

Masterfully constructed from metal and found materials, Lee’s sculptures can be downright terrifying—figures with multiple faces and partly formed limbs, some appearing to drip with silicone, like aliens emerging from primordial ooze, others seeming to gaze at themselves in mirrors. She concedes some similarity between her work and body horror, but mostly speaks of it as beautiful visions of all that humans can be. Her figures are without gender, and intended to dispense with conventional notions about the constructs and confines of disability.

“Instead of forcing bodies to be stable and functioning, we have to give space for fragile bodies,” she said. “I would like the body to be an open system, one that is exposed and fragile.”

Lee initially studied painting at Hongik University in Seoul, where she learned her craft by copying images of nature. When she mastered that, she moved on to working in an Abstract Expressionist mode. But by the time she graduated, she was more interested in working in three dimensions, and that passion has persisted: she tends to dive right in to her labor-intensive sculptures, bypassing advance sketches.

Her most recent works look back to her early art education. This past November, her exhibition at Loggia gallery in Munich, “Devouring Chaos,” featured sculptures alongside abstract paintings made by airbrushing and then lacquering steel plates, so that the color is encased beneath a layer that looks like goo. While these paintings may not represent anything in particular, it’s easy to see in them the conjuring of bodies emerging from voids. If they happen to recall recent experiments with AI-generated art, it’s anything but intentional. “A lot of people said it looks like digital art, but it’s handmade,” Lee said. “I found that interesting—that certain languages just come in naturally.”  

For Phetogo, the inquiry is a step removed from figuration or portraiture in the way it asks what it means to participate in an ongoing conversation that has been growing in volume. A Portrait of the Subject Position at Onset (2020), a painting that depicts his own face smudged with beetle-like daubs of shoe polish, features in “When We See Us: A Century of Black Figuration in Painting,” a milestone exhibition currently on view at Cape Town’s Zeitz MOCAA. Among other things, the show aspires toward “an internal evaluation of collective self-representation.”

As a painter from Botswana operating within a Western-dominated discourse, Phetogo takes a bold approach to a style that might feel uncomfortable but serves, he says, as “an acknowledgment that all is not right.” But this is not all Phetogo’s paintings are about. He likes to travel through wormholes, such as in his “blackbody” series (2019–ongoing) that borrows its title from a physics term referring to a hypothetical perfect entity that absorbs all incident electromagnetic radiation.

The double entendre around blackbody helps establish Phetogo’s interest in subverting expectations—as he does with his figures, which are immediately striking but far from idealized—while slowly building his self-referential network of ideas.

Phetogo’s speculative approach continues in a new body of work titled “Propositions for the Origin of a blackbody,” in which he leans further into figurative abstractions. Proposition 5 – Zombie Figuration, Painting 2 (2022), which hangs beside his self-portrait in the Zeitz show, depicts a body turned inside-out with eyes on an otherwise featureless face, staring blankly ahead. Such work raises an intriguing question: Is it the subject of the portrait that classifies as the zombie, or the ghosts of figuration itself? 

For someone well-accustomed to actual grass, AstroTurf was especially unusual. Baker was born in North Dakota and grew up in the Midwest, where her father worked for the National Park Service. This took the artist, who is of Mandan and Hidatsa descent and an enrolled member of the Three Affiliated Tribes, to what she called “beautiful open spaces” and glorious parks that felt “like my backyard.” Her discovery of AstroTurf owes largely to circumstance. After living in New York and then San Francisco, she joined her husband in Beaumont, Texas, where art supply stores are scarce, around 2015. Wandering around Home Depot one day a couple years later, she “came across this bright blue AstroTurf and was blown away. It felt really alien—it’s not something I grew up with.” She took a piece home to experiment with, and quickly realized it was sturdy enough to hold the unconventional shapes she had been visualizing. She wanted to work against the boundaries that traditional canvases present, creating more fluidity in a process that invites slight imperfections.

Baker, whose work is currently on view in group shows at the Nerman Museum of Contemporary Art in Kansas and the Ucross Art Gallery in Wyoming, now typically uses white AstroTurf, dividing it into color-blocked sections with acrylic and spray paint. She then arranges vibrantly colored yarn atop the AstroTurf, before gluing it down and hand-sewing each piece so the thread is barely visible. Though she works in mixed media, Baker sees her art as based not so much in textile or assemblage as in painting, each strand of yarn akin to a pencil mark. “Abstraction forms its own language that leaves questions and some open-endedness,” she said. At the same time, she relates her work to landscapes and “the feeling of being in the vast expanses of the Northern Plains. Land is a place where culture is.”

Since 2018, Baker has introduced a new kind of tension to her art by incorporating into the synthetic materials organic ones that are traditional to the Mandan and Hidatsa people, like buckskin, willow, buffalo hide, and parfleche. “I had to make sure I knew why and how I was using them, because they have a history of how they were used,” she said. “I was raised with a lot of pride in who I am. Caring for culture means carrying forward these traditions. One thing I’ve always thought about, and especially since having a son, is: How do I carry forward those traditions while living in urban environments?”

In place of sweeping landscapes or fussy interiors are buttery layers of muted monochrome colors. Her favorite hues are “sophisticated grays,” which provoke undefined yet specific feelings and permit a certain struggle with light. These backgrounds contribute tension— which Cheng calls a “guiding principle of creation”—to her paintings. “I search for the sexual nature of desire that holds a painting together and makes you feel immediate to it,” she says. In her encounters with both her own work and that of other artists, she seeks a physical response.

Cheng derives her subject matter from an eclectic range of sources. One painting, Old Stories Retold (2022), depicts the bodies of three men trapped in water with disturbingly vacant facial expressions. Recently exhibited in a solo show at Matthew Marks, the work draws on 20th-century Chinese writer Lu Xun’s short story “Forging the Swords.” That haunting and surreal parable concludes with three severed heads bobbing around in boiling water. Incroyable (En route), 2021, portrays three long-faced men staring out at the viewer from a convertible, a sunset blazing behind them. The painting’s composition is based on a ’90s Saturday Night Live sketch, a silly segment in which Jim Carrey, Will Ferrell, and Chris Kattan nod their heads in sync to the Haddaway song “What Is Love” while driving from one place to the next, crashing a high school prom, a wedding, and bedtime at a senior home along the way. Cheng’s painting transfigures the campiness of the music video into a searching portrayal of a midlife journey to recapture something of the past. In Smoked Turkey Leg (2021), a shirtless man gnaws at a long, barren bone with primal exasperation and a ferocity reminiscent of Goya’s Saturn Devouring His Son.

In our conversation, Cheng emphasized her interest in the inexhaustible questions that paintings can pose, listing examples with simultaneous urgency and reverence. Can she paint the abstract idea of somebody disappearing? How about the specific physical experience of falling through space and getting caught in a net? Can she use unnatural colors to render a face, and make those colors seem utterly natural? “The studio has always been my space for solving the formal issues these questions produce,” Cheng says.

Right now, Cheng is focused on creating a new body of work to answer her latest set of questions, which include how to represent a head with feathers and how to create her own composition inspired by Edvard Munch’s “Jealousy” series. She is enjoying her new studio in Charonne, where, she says, she finally feels she has enough physical and mental space to work.