Stephen Man-Fai Cheng

Stephen Man-Fai Cheng has been a professional artist for thirty years. Beginning in his very early years, he received a very strict education in art. He graduated from Hong Kong Fine Art College and studied under the direction of some of China's most famous painters and art professors. Chen Shou-Soo, who was famous in Italy and China, was his favorite teacher. His instructors taught him to observe life and to try to capture the essence of the subject at hand. His early paintings reflect these ideas in their treatment of still life and images from life. While a teen, he enhanced his grasp of both figure and form by making thousands of impromptu sketches. These studies accelerated his tremendous talent for the creation of art. His past endeavors reflect the diversity of his talents in pursuits such as oil portraits, murals, set designs for both treater and opera and also teaching painting. His works have been in numerous exhibitions and his achievements have been widely reported by newspaper, television and magazine throughout Hong Kong.

In the artist's own words, he describes his work as "large poems that glorify the joy and peace of the inner self...(which) give us the chance to dream", his figures seem to be bathed in an atmosphere of magic realism or fantasy filled with music and dance. With his poetic temperament, he searches for a dream state in which ballerina and light reveal themselves through an intense but formal play of vibrations. He makes the mood romantic without being sentimental, nostalgiv without being sad, happy without being clamorous.