Carl Cheng: 'Ghost Ships'
In: A Quality of Light: a collaborative visual arts event. Penzance: St. Ives International, 1997, pp.25-27
Born in San Francisco, Carl Cheng lives and works in Santa Monica, California. He grew up on the West Coast and much of his work as an artist has developed in or as a response to coastal locations. Although in recent years he has reconciled his differences with the political manoeuvring of the art world and with its commercialism, and has begun to show more work in gallery spaces, he has worked consistently in the public domain, believing in art that 'goes out' to meet its audience, inviting active participation and involvement. The elemental conditions of the coast are evident in his repeated use of water, light and sand as fundamental properties. As signs of 'pure' nature, however, they are invariably combined with mechanical devices that perform activities in which the apparent divisions between nature and technology appear to be resolved and integrated. Cheng enjoys the idea of his machines as 'art tools', the results of experimentation and invention, of finding technical solutions to ideas and conceptual problems.
Cheng's new work Ghost Ships, made for Newlyn Art Gallery, has evolved from a series of experiments with reflections and movement on water that began with his first Black Lake Project in 1976, in which a motor-controlled system of fish line and lead weights made periodic disturbance patterns on the mirror-like surface of a shallow rectangular pool. The meditative, contemplative nature of this work was, in part, the result of Cheng's involvement with Buddhist and Hindu philosophies at that time, and since then he has continued to explore the possibilites inherent in an art of quiet contemplation.
The initial proposal for Ghost Ships involved a public location; large, decommissioned and decaying fishing boats were to be upturned above the Rotary Boating Pool in Wherrytown, Penzance. At night the boats were to be individually lit, casting them adrift against the night sky and reflecting spectral images of submerged boats in the water below.
Later, Cheng transferred his attentions to the upper space of Newlyn Art Gallery and transformed the scale and spirit of his idea. Model boats are suspended above a shallow black pool constructed in the gallery to the scaled-down dimensions of the Rotary Boating Pool. At irregular intervals a concealed motor disturbs the water and fragments the pool's surface and the boats' mirror images.
For this work, Cheng has brought the ethos of his public art into the gallery. Working with local model-makers and boating enthusiasts to make and select boats for his own installation, he has also curated an exhibition of model boats in the lower gallery. Recalling the contemplative aspects of Cheng's art, these model boats can be seen as metaphors for a kind of faith, poised in a space for quiet reflection. But they are also 'real' testaments to a local culture (and artistic tradition) still entwined in an unbroken relationship with the sea. [DC]
Being a sculptor interested in all manner of site-specific natural phenomena, the notion of a 'quality of light' reminds me of an impressionistic 19th-century 'painterly' concept.
As we approach the 21st century and from a perspective of California, a land of perpetual sunlight, light takes on a more scientific characteristic. Sunlight filters through the atmosphere. What are the particulates in the air today? Smog conditions, for instance, create frighteningly beautiful sunsets, etc. These conditions are the ingredients that make up the quality of light here ... and tell us if we need sunblock 6 or 32.
If we extend the idea of quality of light to ourselves, the human receptors of that light, then it is not impossible to observe specific emotional reactions to this and other natural conditions of our environment, as well as to begin to understand the entire social phenomena of human nature. [CC]