New Primordial Chaos
Can I see it?
Not on view at present
Where is “New Primordial Chaos” now? Collection: The Cleveland Museum of Art, Cleveland. Not on view at present. Checked September 29, 2026.
Cleveland, United States
It belongs to the collection, but is not on display at present.
- Checked
- In this state since
- Source
- The museum
About the painting
Michael Cherney has a "painterly" style of landscape photography much inspired by the aesthetics of Chinese painting. Here, he superimposed a photograph of the sun onto the composition of Hunlun tu by Zhu Derun (1294–1365), a famous 14th-century Chinese painting variously translated as "Primordial Chaos" or the "Cosmic Circle." Zhu Derun depicted a circle to convey the Daoist cosmological idea of primordial chaos—the great undifferentiated matter out of which heaven and earth and all forms emerged.
Read on
Cherney's New Primordial Chaos revisits the chaos after creation, a human-generated chaos that is so overwhelming and toxic that it can cloud the sun, making it look like not itself but the moon. Polluted air and clouds shroud the sun on a Beijing day. The resulting image, which resembles the moon shining in the night sky, is the artist's deliberate attempt to create confusion and subtle critique of the contemporary environmental crisis.
The Cleveland Museum of Art
Details
- Accession number
- 2015.80
In the catalog
Sources
- The Cleveland Museum of Art
- Image: The Cleveland Museum of Art — © the artist or rights holder
