Michael Cherney (b. 1969), also known as Qiu Mai, or “Autumn Wheat,” is a landscape photographer based in Beijing. Born in 1969 to a Jewish American family in Queens, his work embodies a dialogue between traditional and contemporary approaches to art, as well as between Asian and Western artistic modes. Since the early 1990s, Cherney has been creating works that engage with such Chinese historical modes of artistic production as the folded album, handscroll, string-bound book, and hanging scroll. He travels to locations in China historically important for Chinese art, to photograph natural landscapes (including Mount Huang, Mount Song, the Eight Views of the Xiao and Xiang), or ancient artistic sites (the Wordless Stele, a northern China spirit road, and a Buddhist grotto). Following a lengthy editing process, he has his works printed on the xuan paper used in Chinese ink painting, and then mounted meticulously by artisans who are the best in their craft. Presenting China’s sublime natural beauty, his film photography produces a spontaneous effect similar to ink painting, which is impossible to achieve with a digital camera. In his Bounded by Mountains series, Cherney employed a technique that involved cropping slivers out of 35 mm film shots, then enlarging the images to the point where boundaries and lines begin to dissolve. The resulting series of images mimics the sense of shifting perspective often depicted in traditional Chinese landscape paintings. Present in much of Cherney’s work, the process of editing and enlarging the image disturbs the indexical nature of photography. The enlarged photo excerpts draw our attention to microscopic detail and arouse an awareness of the rhythms of nature.

In contrast to other contemporary artists’ themes of China’s rapidly transforming urban landscapes, Cherney’s images arouse a new awareness of the rhythms of life in the natural world. Not only do they present the essence of nature in its dignity, but they also offer a poetical and intimate vision that evokes emotion and inspires thought. His works have been collected by major institutions including The Metropolitan Museum of Art and Princeton University Art Museum and have been included in exhibitions at The Cleveland Museum of Art, The Nelson-Atkins Museum of Art, Asian Art Museum, Getty Research Institute, Peabody Essex Museum, Arthur M. Sackler Museum, Harvard Art Museum, Santa Barbara Museum of Art, Berkeley Art Museum, and Yale University Art Gallery, among others. 

MSW