NEWLY OPENED EXHIBITION
Light and Grain 秋麦
June 12 – August 23, 2025
Opening Reception: Friday, June 27 from 5-8pm
We are pleased to present Light & Grain, a solo exhibition by American photographer Michael Cherney (b. 1969). 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. We are positioned like a figure seated beside a river, always facing downstream, watching as the current of time slips steadily past. For Cherney, photography becomes a way to gather what is already passing—a means of holding the transient present within a fixed and visible frame. It offers a quiet act of preservation, allowing fragments of time to remain, even as they drift beyond reach.
The exhibition’s title, Light & Grain, speaks to the two elemental forces at the heart of Cherney’s work.“Light” evokes the fundamental condition of photography—its reliance on illumination, clarity, and the ephemeral instant. “Grain” refers both to the photosensitive texture of analog film and to the artist’s Chinese name 秋麦 Qiumai—Mai 麦 (wheat), cultivated and ripened in Qiu 秋 (autumn), a season of transformation. These resonances run through Cherney’s work, where each image becomes not only a record of what is seen but a moment shaped by time and embedded in place. Unlike literati painting, which often imagines ideal landscapes, Cherney turns his lens toward real sites—marked by erosion, memory, and the quiet persistence of history.
In Light & Grain, Michael Cherney navigates the currents of time through three interlocking movements: Tracing Downstream, where ancient myth and contemporary terrain converge in album-like sequences; Reflections in Midstream, which transforms fleeting instants into immersive, scroll- and fan-inspired experiences; and The Unseen Upstream, a cross-cultural dialogue of calligraphy and collaborative brushwork that hints at futures beyond our view. By enlarging the subtle textures of his negatives, Cherney distills each frame to its essence—“seeing the grand within the small”—and fuses photographic rigor with the spirit of ink painting. Together, these works bring past, present, and future into quiet convergence, inviting viewers to witness time’s flowing passages, held momentarily within the stillness of the frame.
We look forward to welcoming you to the gallery soon!
To learn more, click here.
PAST ASIA WEEK NEW YORK EXHIBITION
Fluid Strength: The Art of Ink
March 13 – May 3, 2025
Opening Reception: Friday, March 14th from 5-8pm
Asia Week Artist Talk Series: Sunday & Monday, March 16 &17 from 3-5pm (In-person & Online)
We are pleased to present Fluid Strength: The Art of Ink, a group exhibition during 2025 Asia Week. This exhibition explores the profound philosophical connotations of water-based ink as a medium, rooted in the Daoist concept of softness, yielding, and resilience. In East Asian art history, water and ink symbolize Yin energy—gentle yet powerful, nourishing and sustaining all life. This principle is vividly expressed in Daoist thought: “Water flows without contention, achieving great deeds by simply being natural.”
Water’s ability to adapt, nurture, and overcome reflects an essential worldview that has shaped Chinese culture, art, and philosophy for centuries. From ancient calligraphy and landscape painting to contemporary expressions, ink art embodies this enduring perspective, flowing across time and geography—from East Asia to the West.
In conjunction with the exhibition, we hosted a two-part artist talk series (March 16 & 17, 3-5pm) celebrating contemporary Asian and transcultural art. The first session, “Ink Art: The Past in the Present,” highlighted three Chinese diaspora artists—Tai Xiangzhou, Wang Mansheng, and Zhang Xiaoli—who reinvigorate classical ink traditions. The second session, “Tradition Across Borders: A Transcultural Exchange,” featured Arnold Chang, Michael Cherney, and Brandon Sadler, American artists who explore East Asian aesthetics through transcultural mediums, bridging tradition and innovation.
This exhibition invites viewers to experience the timeless power and grace of water-based ink art, celebrating its role in connecting tradition and innovation, philosophy and artistic practice.
To learn more about the exhibition, click here.
RELATED TALKS NOW ONLINE
QM Talks | Asia Week New York Artist Talk Series
We’re excited to announce that the complete video recordings of our two-part artist talk series—Ink Art: The Past in the Present and Tradition Across Borders: A Transcultural Exchange—are now available to view online!
Presented in celebration of Asia Week New York, these insightful discussions brought together six remarkable artists who explore the dynamic relationship between tradition and innovation in contemporary Asian and transcultural art. Whether you missed the live sessions or would like to revisit the conversations, you can now stream both events by clicking here.
INK ART: THE PAST IN THE PRESENT
Sunday, March 16 from 3-5pm
In-person & Online (Kindly RSVP)
The first part “Ink Art: The Past in the Present,” highlights Tai Xiangzhou, Wang Mansheng, and Zhang Xiaoli—three Chinese diaspora artists whose work draws essence from classical East Asian culture, rediscovering the evolution of tradition in the contemporary world. They discussed their innovative approaches to the ink art tradition, incorporating interdisciplinary perspectives, and share insights into their current exhibitions in esteemed institutions across the U.S.
TRADITION ACROSS BORDERS: A TRANSCULTURAL EXCHANGE
Monday, March 17 from 3-5pm
In-person & Online (Kindly RSVP)
The second part, “Tradition Across Borders: A Transcultural Exchange,” featured Arnold Chang, Michael Cherney, and Brandon Sadler—three American artists from distinct cultural backgrounds. United by their deep engagement with East Asian visual culture, they create works inspired by centuries-old traditions of East Asian painting and calligraphy. This discussion explored their transcultural practices on East Asian art through distinct artistic mediums, reflecting the interconnected realities of today’s global world and challenging cultural binaries by bridging Eastern and Western aesthetics.
To learn more about these talks, click here.
About the Gallery
We work at the intersection of East and West, contemporary and traditional. We are dedicated to exploring the visual and geographic globalization of contemporary Asian art and documenting artists’ work that resonates with classical Asian philosophy, aesthetics, and culture, with no limits on their expressive mediums.
With the rapidly evolving contemporary art scene as our backdrop, our mission is to present major artists’ creative trajectories to a wider audience through exhibitions, in-depth interviews, critical analysis, and forums for scholarly exchanges. FQM ultimately provides an educational venue where visual pleasure is paired with intellectual challenge, highlighting the broad effects of globalization, and transnational and diaspora experiences.
Our team, enriched with over a decade of experience from leading global auction houses, offers unparalleled expertise in the appraisal, dealing, and management of Chinese art. Grounded in a commitment to excellence, we are certified by the Appraisers Association of America (AAA) and adhere to the Uniform Standards of Professional Appraisal Practice (USPAP).
