Isaacs Art Center

Yvonne Cheng

A native of Java, Indonesia, Yvonne Cheng (born 1941) arrived in Hawaii in 1967. Shortly thereafter, she enrolled in batik classes at the Bishop Museum; this was to become her primary medium over the next two decades, and, indeed, her works on batik — primarily depicting Hawaiian women — remain instantly recognizable to this day. Cheng also worked with ink on paper. After her batik period, she shifted to abstracted paper collages, but soon returned to rendering Polynesian women, this time using acrylics. Initially, her subjects were dressed in traditional kapa garments, but she gradually added Tahitian textile designs to make her works more contemporary Polynesian, often using as a background the lush tropical foliage surrounding her studio deep in Palolo Valley on Oahu. 

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