High Noon

Ching Ho Cheng painted High Noon while living in the Chelsea Hotel, a celebrated New York City residence for artists and other creative people, where he rented a small one-bedroom apartment as his studio. The apartment had southern exposure and at midday the sun would cast brilliant light on the painted apartment walls. In the early 1980s, Cheng produced a series of gouache paintings of luminous sunlight reflected through the windows of his apartment. While the painting can be read as abstract, it is more clearly a representation of a window frame, a refined distillation that didn’t depict the source of light, but rather the ephemeral effects of light and its corresponding shadows. Here, reality and illusion are harmonized and become a single entity, an evocation of sheer immateriality.