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Ching Ho Cheng: Luminous Life and Legacy
BANK NYC
Please join BANK NYC for a panel discussion on the life and artistic legacy of cultural luminary, Ching Ho Cheng. This panel talk coincides with Cheng's solo exhibition, Tracing Infinity, at BANK's NYC pilot space from May 2 - June 14, 2025.
Our panelists, Sybao Cheng-Wilson, Director of the Estate of Ching Ho Cheng, Gordon Wilkins, Robert M. Walker Curator of American Art at the Addison Gallery of American Art, and Kyle Croft, Executive Director of Visual AIDS, will contextualize Cheng's work within the rich New York art scene of the 1970s and 1980s and offer critical perspectives on his practice as a prolific Asian American and LGBTQ artist.
This panel discussion precedes Cheng's inclusion in Sixties Surreal at the Whitney Museum of American Art in Fall 2025 and his upcoming traveling retrospective, Ching Ho Cheng: The Light Will Continue, which will originate at the Addison Gallery of American Art in early 2027. This will be Cheng’s first major institutional retrospective, which fervently reconsiders this Asian American artist's often overlooked life and body of work. It will also be accompanied by a monograph published in collaboration with Visual AIDS.
Panelists:
Sybao Cheng-Wilson was born and raised in New York City, where both she and her mother studied at the Mayor School of Fashion Design. After graduating, she moved to Paris and modeled for fashion icons Antonio Lopez and photographer Bill Cunningham while studying French and ballet. She returned to the US in the 1970s and created a collection of hand embroidered women’s wear with her mother, distributed to boutiques and the finest department stores across the country. Cheng-Wilson was featured in New York Magazine’s Best Bets and Soho News.
As of 1989, Cheng-Wilson has dedicated herself extensively to the stewardship and curatorial duties of Ching Ho Cheng's extensive oeuvre as Director of the Estate of Ching Ho Cheng. She has organized posthumous solo exhibitions of her brother's work at Shepherd W&K Galleries, David Zwirner, and Art Basel Miami, as well as Cheng's upcoming traveling retrospective at the Addison Gallery of American Art.
Gordon Wilkins is the Robert M. Walker Curator of American Art at the Addison Gallery of American Art, Phillips Academy, Andover, MA. Wilkins oversees the care, exhibition, and growth of the Addison’s world-renowned collection of American art across media with a particular focus on the art of the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. He has curated numerous exhibitions on a broad array of topics, ranging from European-American perceptions of the natural world in the nineteenth century to 1970s Bay Area conceptual photography. Wilkins is currently working on several special exhibition projects, notably Ching Ho Cheng: The Light Will Continue, the artist’s first retrospective and posthumous solo museum exhibition. The exhibition will open in early 2027 at the Addison before travelling to additional venues.
Before he arrived at the Addison in October 2018, Wilkins served as the Assistant Curator for Exhibitions and Research at the Peabody Essex Museum, Salem, MA for three years where he helped organize several temporary and permanent exhibition projects and publications including the celebrated Sally Mann: A Thousand Crossings (co-organized with the National Gallery of Art, Washington). He has contributed to several scholarly publications, including Unnamed Figures: Black Presence and Absence in the Early American North (2023) and Young, Gifted and Black: A New Generation of Artists (2020), and has lectured widely. Wilkins has also served as an Adjunct Professor of the History of American Art at the University of New Hampshire.
Kyle Croft is the Executive Director of Visual AIDS. In his seven years with the organization, he has worked to preserve the legacies of artists lost to AIDS and support a global community of artists living with HIV. He is organizing the exhibition Ministry: Reverend Joyce McDonald, opening this July at the Bronx Museum, and has edited volumes on Darrel Ellis, Frederick Weston, and William Olander.
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