THE PROMISED LAND
19 March to 18 April 2009
Opening reception Thurs 19 March
6-8pm
Promised Land
–noun
1. Heaven.
2. Canaan, the land promised by God to Abraham and his descendants.
Gen. 12:7.
3. (often lowercase) a place or situation believed to hold
ultimate happiness.
Dictionary.com
Jack Shainman is pleased to present British Born Chinese
artist Gordon Cheung’s first solo gallery show in the
USA. His dual background has fuelled his interest in paradoxically
belonging and not to both cultures, a condition that led him
to focus his work on existence in the artificial landscape
of globalization. For Cheung we are all in an in-between state.
Using Financial Times stock listings as a ground in his multi-media
paintings Cheung depicts spaces inspired by 19th-century Romantic
landscape paintings and Science Fiction. The listings are
a metaphor for the dominant global economic ideology that
maps the torrential streams of capital around the world. Cheung’s
paintings are ‘virtual-reality environments’ where
‘faith’ in the numbers of the stock exchange to
deliver a ‘Promised Land’ dictates our lives.
An overarching theme of his work is of the ‘techno-sublime’;
instead of an overwhelming experience of nature bringing us
closer to God, the visual rhetoric of the sublime has exchanged
to omnipotent information which overwhelms us with an artificial
landscape.
Cheung based the show around the romantic myth of the pioneering
spirit and the ideas of manifest destiny. He is fascinated
by the landscape genre where there is an undercurrent of propaganda
of taking what God has ‘given’ you, never mind
the blood soaking along the way - Beauty, Shock and Awe; War
on Terror and political gain. Paintings of Rodeo riders become
both Romantic icons of conquest and allegories for man’s
relationship with the environment. Bull riders, contemporary
versions of the Minotaur, combine man and bull to serve as
an analogy for the financial bull market and extreme corporate
being.
Cheung’s Technicolor palette scorches the sentimental
sepia and flesh tones of the stock listings and creates luminosity
within the work. His colors are toxic with a psychedelic and
hallucinatory vision referencing the counter-cultural movement,
a neon glare, a nuclear sunset, a drug induced vision or even
a religious heavenly light. They are artificially luminous,
a metaphor perhaps for a techno-utopian vision; when the Internet
and mobile phones became readily available it fuelled the
digital and communications revolution that gave rise to such
terms as Information Superhighways, digital frontiers and
global villages. All of which fell into dystopia after the
millennium bug, the dotcom crash, collapse of Enron, destruction
of the twin towers – and all before the current recession.
Yet despite the post-apocalyptic mood the paintings offer
glimmers of hope, their multi-layered spaces encourage perception
beyond what is at first visible.
Gordon Cheung lives and works in London. He earned his Master
of Fine Arts in Painting from the Royal College of Art in
2001 and has exhibited his work in both solo and group exhibitions
internationally at such venues as the Hirshhorn Museum &
Sculpture Garden, Washinton, DC; the Aldrich Museum, Connecticut;
the Royal Academy of Arts, London; Arizona State Univeristy
Art Museum, Arizona; and the BALTIC, Gateshead. He has a forthcoming
major museum solo show at the New Art Gallery, Walsall UK
2009
For further information and press photography please contact
Jack Shainman Gallery at (212) 645-1701.
Jack Shainman Gallery
513 West 20th Street
New York, NY 10011
212-645-1701 Tel
212-645-8316 Fax
info@jackshainman.com
www.jackshainman.com
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