This commemorative exhibition celebrates the paintings of Josephine Shuk-Fong Cheung, which have been withheld from public view for nearly forty years. Born in Hong Kong in 1954, Cheung moved to Toronto, Canada, when she was twenty years old. She studied painting at the Ontario College of Art (today, OCAD University) and distinguished herself as a talented artist. Following graduation in 1979, she remained in Toronto, which had become a leading international center for the visual arts. The growing number of professional artists, organizations, and galleries gave the city great appeal and created a dynamic atmosphere that encouraged experimentation and innovation. In painting, Abstract Expressionism was the lingua franca, and some of Cheung’s early works experiment with its rebellious rejection of traditional representation. In 1980 she travelled to New York City to immerse herself in the paintings and theories of Willem de Kooning and Jackson Pollock, the American superstars of the Ab Ex movement. 

After her New York stay, she gradually lost faith in abstract art: “Before, I never doubted the concept of clarity in the language of abstract art, such as color and line. But then I discovered that abstract art lacks what it is to be human – I wanted to express more than pure concepts. And I came to the realization that when we detach ourselves from the natural world, and choose concepts to define our existence, we separate ourselves from humanity” (1986 interview). Windows of buildings fascinated her, with the simplicity and definition of their four-sided geometry.

In Ill. 1, the earliest painting in the exhibition, she divided space into nine parts, arranged three by three on the large canvas. Inside these rectilinear boundaries, float patches of brush strokes, several flecked with a yellow streak that evokes the flash of light. As she worked with window-like shapes, she came to interpret them as signs of isolation and constraint, as an index of the disheartening rupture between humans and nature that urbanization had brought about.

Figurative referents return to her paintings in the series entitled The Faces of Enigma. In Ill. 2, the dominant forms in the center carry suggestions of the eyes and noses of the human visage. Here, Cheung’s exploration of space becomes bolder, more complex, and more ambitious. Structuring the painting with three quasi-geometric forms, she varied their size, depth, and orientation. The rightmost form has a sense of spatial recession, which contrasts with the planarity of the rectangles beside and behind. In the composite shape in the left foreground, the curvilinear edges both evidence and subvert a sense of three dimensions. Further opening the painting’s space is the red-and-black horizontal in the upper left, which evokes a windowsill, above and beyond which appear what look like patches of blue sky and scudding clouds.

Cheung experimented with color, line, and space throughout the paintings of the mid 1980s. In Ill. 3, thick strokes of black, red, yellow, and orange energize the canvas and play against the passage of vivid opalescence at the center. On the right, a curvilinear oblong with closed eyelids, thin nose, and black mouth bears a resemblance to the features of an Inuit mask in the simplicity of its roundish shape and its facial referents. The rough-edged black line that ambiguously defines the mask ends toward the top, taking part of the mask with it. The suggestion of eyes and a fat nose appear in the lower left, with witty hints of chiaroscuro created by streaks of bright yellow (right) and deep black (left). Chiaroscuro—literally, light-dark in Italian— is a traditional technique often used by portrait painters: highlighting one side of the face and shadowing the other gives the paint’s flat surface a sense of three-dimensionality. The strokes of brown paint in the lower right corner evoke the edge of a radically cropped tabletop and imply that the painting’s space continues beyond the frame. Placed on the table is a solid, triangular form with the sketch-like suggestion of an eye—perhaps another reference to a work created by an Inuit or a First Nations artist.

The references to still life become explicit in Ill. 4, where variegated horizontals cross the painting’s lower edge and suggest the edge of a table placed parallel to the picture plane. A multicolor pyramidal element dominates the center of the painting, and against it leans a pale diagonal oblong. One motif that recurs through centuries of still-life painting is the depiction of a human skull, which adds emotional weight to the universe of small-scale objects. Memento mori — “Remember you must die”— is the Latin term for this type of death’s-head image and is meant to remind viewers of the transiency of life. Cheung articulated the skull with two blue markings that seem to imply an eye and the edge of the nose. To the right, a more intense rectangle is suggested by streaks of blood red, deep black, and skin-toned pinkish-orange, which could indicate either a second eyehole or the broken nose bone often seen in painted skulls. And cutting through the lower part of the skull is a passage of sharp black paint, which suggests the absence of bone beneath the human cheek. Beneath the two objects, a larger area of saturated black suggests deep shadow, while the thick streak of grey paint along the tabletop’s back edge reads as a continuation of cast shadow. A bright mesh of opaque and translucent strokes animates the upper background and advances forward to enclose and highlight the objects in the foreground.

In Ill. 5, a female body reclines across painting, her sex indicated by the yellow triangle outlined in red and by the breast-like hill in the upper right. Cheung divided landscape—foreground, middle ground, and sky. The connection between the natural environment and the female body is another trope with a long visual tradition, this one emanating from the association of both elements with ideas of fecundity and generation. In pop culture, the term “Mother Earth” exemplifies this link, the complexities of which were explored by women artists in the 1970s and 1980s. In Ill. 21, each zone has its own topography and coloration. In the foreground, thick strokes of opaque black and brown evoke a stretch of rich, dark earth, as well as some sort of interior surface, on which the female body is displayed. The hillside/nude are composed of long pastel strokes, which become most intense in the nude’s pubic area. Crossing these zones is an attractive, but menacing semicircle of sharp yellow-orange, cut at the center and bearing two white shapes resembling teeth. Nancy Tong has identified the object as a depiction of the eponymous figure from the video game Pac-Man, which spellbound an international audience after its appearance in 1980. The aim of the game is to maneuver the figure to gobble up as many dots as possible, and the word Pac-Man apparently derives from a Japanese character signifying “mouth.” The figure’s crisp edges make it an unusually well-defined element in Cheung’s art, as if she is slyly disclosing its importation from the world of computer graphics—and its signification as a devouring pictorial element. Above the horizontal female, short, curving strokes of rapidly applied white pigment—several forming a heart shape in the upper right—create an aura of emotional intensity, as if emanating from the nude.

In 1987 Josephine Shuk-Fong Cheung moved to Montréal with her partner Andrew Liu, and she died there two years later, at the age of 35. I never met her, but I need to add that I have taken great joy and solace from spending this time looking closely at her artworks. What I have discovered through the canvases is a person of huge talent and determination. Someone who demanded of herself that she keep experimenting, keep pushing the boundaries of her painting, keep looking, keep learning, keep deepening. Even though this book comprises relatively few of her works, I found it impossible to miss the enormity of the changes that occur, as she became more accomplished, more astute in her painterly practice. Coursing through the works is a powerful sense of integrity. Thank you, Josephine.