4 Dec 2009 - 31 Jan 2010
Gordon Cheung (Solo Show)
ROOM Artspace, London UK

Enter the Matrix

Welcome to collapsing buildings, graffiti covered ruins and neon palm trees in overgrown phosphorescent pools that occupy Gordon Cheung’s epic landscapes devoid of humans wrenched open with chasms and craters. Cheung’s complex material combinations and images resonate with universal themes and archetypes of Paradise, Earth and the Underworld. In Skyscraper, a distorting Modernist building echoes the 911 tragedy and also the Tower of Babel Myth. In War of Reason, a monstrous tree and the mountain shadows combine to form a mushroom cloud in a post-apocalyptic world or a UFO with a laser blast. Cheung’s monochromatic sepia images evoke a nostalgic sentiment but he aggressively blasts this comfort zone with luminous voids of spray paint as if scorching open a virtual dimension.

The paintings tap into the collective archetypes of the unconscious where ancient mythological vistas merge with the contemporary technological world. They intentionally blur the lines of fiction and reality so that in this liminal space we question our habitual perceptions of reality. Think Matrix – the entire world as a computer construct – crossed with David Lynch’s dream spaces, the multiplicating realities in the sci-fi novels of Philp K. Dick and the urban surreal dystopias of J.G. Ballard’s fictions, and you have the cultural background of Cheung’s paintings.

Cheung’s parents came from Hong Kong to London in the late 60s to make a new life in a Brixton squat. He is a 1975 British Born Chinese (BBC), and “his energetic, witty work is a classic product of an urban 70s and 80s childhood, caught between the fast street-cred and blaze of cheap materialism outside and the inner world of computer games in which his generation was the first to grow up." (‘Market Gains’, Jackie Wullschlager, Financial Times magazine, Oct 16 2004). He says that he feels he is rooted in both cultures but neither as well....”I never took anything for granted." It is this sense of in-between-ness that became one of the main undercurrents of his work. Between 1994-98 he was a Central Saint Martins art student and the first thing he did was to set himself a challenge of painting without paint to question the nature of the medium itself. Initially it led him to substitute paint for collage, seeing this as a way of side-stepping the Modernist notion that painting should only be about itself but still work within its linguistic framework and expand it. It was in the process of cutting, tearing and gluing down fragments from the everyday that he realised he wanted his work to literally reflect current events. Cyberspace and the information Superhighway were terms that were just making its way into the mainstream. The digital frontier and global villages were the latest utopic proclamations to be used where notions of borders and boundaries were blurring under Globalisation. The feeling of in-between-ness was a sensation that Cheung felt was literally around the whole world and he felt compelled to find a way to mirror it through his work.

By the time he graduated from the Royal College of Art (1999-2001) his choice of collage was distilled to the stock listings of the Financial Times which for him was a direct metaphor for our contemporary landscape. He chose it for its density of information, global reach and because in a sense it is a dreamworld where investors chase after promises of instant wealth; a virtual reality where shifting numbers affect all our lives.