Jonathan Goodman discusses in an article for Yishu Journal of Contemporary Art the relationship of ornament in her paintings.
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Roberta Smith reviews Emily Cheng and Lois Conner at Plum Blossom Gallery, for the New York Times.
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Edward Sozanski reviews Emily Cheng's solo show at the Schmidt Dean Gallery for the Philadelphia Inquirer.
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Alice Guillermo reviews Emily Cheng's solo show at the Ayala Museum, in Manila for Asian Art News and Business Mirror.
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EXCERPTS FROM ART REVIEWS AND ESSAYS

 "Emily Cheng's work reminds us that painting is still able to compel attention. ……The oils are contradictory in two ways. In their coloring and design, they're ebullient while simultaneously communicating gravity and, in a few instances, an elegiac mood."
-Edward J. Sozanski, Philadelphia Inquirer

"On small layered sheets of frosty Mylar, Cheng's delicate and inventive play with symbols, styles mark-making and translucency creates semiotic reveries."
- Ken Johnson, New York Times

"Her art is unusually ambitious in an art-historical sense, for she attempts to address the problem of style across boundaries of culture and time."
- Jonathan Goodman, Art News

"Emily Cheng's "Bodhissatva Series" fuses Persian miniatures, medieval illuminations and painterly abstractions into monoprints of near-psychedelic richness."
–Joanne Silver, Boston Herald.

"Cheng presents the viewer with glowing redressings of familiar and unfamiliar spiritual imagery in seductive and masterly compositions through which color sings and form becomes an abstract evocation of an inner world. It is not possible to convey the beauty of these images without sounding clichéd or hackneyed. ….What sets Cheng's work apart is a sincere and well-informed understanding of her sources, and intense sensitivity to the religious /cultural significance of the images and what comes across as a love of the material, both in the original and her own contemporary usage. …..With Cheng's aid we are given the chance to connect our world with ones form the past and see our humanity in the process."
- Robert Brasier, Everybody's News.

"…Among the challenges for painting now is to create new forms of pictorial order that acknowledge the intensified contingency of contemporary life. By accepting this challenge, Chengs paintings ask the question: What does it mean to inhabit the world?"
-Jonathan Hay, Pleasure as Medium, Almost Mapped and Charted.

"Completely source agnostic, Cheng is bent on form and form alone and relies solely on her aesthetic and intuitive judgment while assembling images. And, perhaps, it is because of that unwavering focus that her work has been able to achieve a level of harmony that it does. In a sense, she has succeeded in teasing meaning out of form and shows us that it, in itself, can exert great power, both palpable and transcendental."
–Priya Malhotra, Asian Art News