| |
WILDERNESS OF MIRRORS
Preview: Fri
5 Sept 2008 6pm
Gordon Cheung’s first solo show in Germany takes place
from September 5th to October 18th, 2008 at Galerie ADLER
in Frankfurt am Main. The show‘s title takes it’s
name from James Jesus Angleton‘s phrase ‘Wilderness
of Mirrors’ with which he used to describe the double-agent
confusion and strange loops of espionage. James Jesus Angleton
was a long-serving chief of CIA’s counter-intelligence
staff in the 1950s and many commentators believe that Angleton
took the term from T. S. Eliot’s poem ‘Gerontion’
with whom he was friendly with.
The title of the show alludes to landscape and the dark undertones
of conspiracy and paranoia. Cheung’s multi-media paintings
reflect his interests in the power structures, belief systems
and our obedience to them. In formal terms he twists the figure
ground relationship into an oscillating mobius strip. The
initial perception of his paintings seem to exist in the figurative
dimension yet closer inspection reveals that the base of all
his paintings are actually stock listings from the Financial
Times. These abstract numerical lists flatten the space and
paradoxically signifies a virtual reality that intertwines
our real lives on a global scale.
Cheung’s paintings capture the hallucinations between
the virtual and actual realities of a globalised world oscillating
between Utopia and Dystopia. Spray paint, oil, acrylic, pastels,
stock listings and ink collide in his works to form epic techno-sublime
vistas.
All the time he makes visual and conceptual references to
the discourse of Modernist painting by using the archetypal
visual rhetoric of Modernism; flatness, grid, gesture and
materiality. The use of different techniques and languages
deliberately interrupts the reading of the painting to encourage,
in Cheung’s words, a kind of telescopic deconstruction,
that has a relationship to the way, how we are always looking
or experiencing something beyond. For example when we speak
into phones, write and read emails or surf for information
on the Internet, it’s as if we are in an alternate dimension.
It’s as if we temporarily dematerialise into virtual
landscape.
Cheung began using the stock listings in 1995 when mobile
phones and internet were becoming readily available. He was
excited by the utopic euphoria of digital frontiers, global
villages, information superhighways and Cyberspace; this digital
and communication revolution compelled him to visually respond
to this modern dimension. Time and space had collapsed into
the instant - reconfiguring our perceptions into a state of
constant flux. The utopic euphoria was short-lived with the
collapse of tech stocks after the entrance into the 21st century,
the global hysteria over the millenium and by the titanic
corporate corruption of Enron and Worldcom. All these events
were underlined by more recorded natural disasters than at
any other time, followed by the twin tower attacks that led
to Global War of Terror.
If you think of what is omnipresent, omniscient and omnipotent,
you could also philosophize about the stock market as about
the belief in God or another possible power. Cheung has converged
these ideas and raises questions to visualize us the megalithic
structure, in which we all exist. It is for him our contemporary
landscape – a Wilderness of Mirrors.
Galerie
Adler Frankfurt am Main
Hanauer Landstraße 134
60314 Frankfurt
Germany
+49 (0)69 43053962
fax +49 (0)180 3118866568
+49 (0)170 7324366
mail@galerieadler.com
|
|
