Bio
Tracie attended the University of Texas in Austin and graduated with a degree in architecture. After several years of architectural work, her desire to shape environments shifted to the visual arts. The textures and blending of her paintings are not unlike her own life story. As the first of her Taiwanese family to be born in the United States, Tracie grew up carrying the beauty and intricacies of both cultures. Her artistic style channels aspects of Chinese brush painting, abstraction, and architectural renderings and gives voice to an ever-evolving relationship with faith, culture, ethnicity, and narrative. Tracie has shown her work at galleries in Los Angeles, New York City, Vancouver, and Shanghai. One of her first major projects was a series of paintings for Marina Bay Sands in Singapore, and her paintings are now in public and private collections all over the world. Tracie feels fortunate to be pursuing art full-time, and navigating work and life alongside her husband, sculptor Eóin Burke, and their son in New England.
Artist Statement
The rice fields and fog covered mountains of Taiwan. The crisp tall grass, smokey alleys, and vibrant night markets. Memory, family, identity. In Tracie Cheng’s newest body of work, these ideas distill into the search for narratives that form the artist. The results are complex and ethereal paintings full of soft and hard textures from a long line of powerful stories.
The pandemic has affected everyone in different ways, and for Tracie this period became a time of rediscovery, an embracing of ethnicity, and a newfound affection of who she is and where she comes from. Carrying the grit and kindness of her grandmothers and the precious stories of the grandfathers she never had the chance to meet, their reflections dance within the backgrounds and meander through the lines. These sacred memories are found throughout the paintings, honoring the strength and warmth of all those that came before.
Much like bringing a camera lens into focus, there can be clarity and areas of haze when revisiting moments from the past. Within the lines of each painting, there is a crispness to the image, while the background recedes and blurs, representing the tension that even the most important memories are fuzzy at best. Although reliving moments of the past can feel foreign and complex, they remain integral to who Cheng is, and who she is becoming.
