How do we visualize the digital? The virtual? What does the
information age look like? Neologisms engendered by the invention
of new technologies often tie the invisible, interstitial, or
difficult to comprehend to the overtly physical: “information
highway,” “cyberspace,” “surfing the net,”
“downloading.” London-based artist Gordon Cheung understands
that these physical associations are not mere metaphors for actions,
data, or ideas that are floating around in a virtual abyss, for
the information age has resulted in concrete transformations,
profoundly impacting the landscapes and cityscapes that make up
our physical surroundings.
Gordon Cheung’s mixed media paintings depict sites at once
generalized and idiosyncratic. Their familiarity stems from Cheung’s
ability to combine numerous references into a single image, wherein
space expands and contracts as if on the verge of collapse and
time seems to reach toward the future while remaining firmly rooted
in the past. Collaging the distinctively pink pages of London’s
Financial Times onto the surface of his paintings, the columns
of data serve as visual evidence of the complex digital networks
that now connect countless physical locations, while also establishing
a sense of cohesion in these mysterious and ominous landscapes.
While several of Cheung’s paintings of 2004 position a boxy,
modernist building within a natural environs (monolithic reminders
of the man-made struggling against dangerous precipices or staking
a claim amongst a nearly apocalyptic arid expanse), his most recent
works are hallucinatory, Rorschachian landscapes more overtly
rooted in the psychological and the sublime. Rendered in exquisite
washy black ink with punctuations of bright, artificial colors,
a bleakness permeates these sites; yet, they are tempered by a
somewhat ironic, but nonetheless enchanting, optimism, often symbolized
by one or more rainbows traversing the canvas.
The foreground of Cheung’s Crater (2004) is filled with
craggy, steep cliffs surrounding a psychedelic lake where bursts
of green, blue, and purple bubble to the surface. In some places
the rock face becomes a hybrid of the natural and the hand-built
in the form of walls of stacked bricks; like decaying, ancient,
stepped temples, these ruins are disconcertingly warped as if
viewed through a heat wave. Along the far wall of the crater,
nearly indecipherable, yet somehow cheerfully familiar, graffiti
covers the surface. And, in the middle of the canvas sits a Stonehenge-like
configuration—an icon of the balance between and man and
nature—flanked by two mirroring rainbows. The entire space
is shrouded under a dark, cloudy sky with a staccato bolt of purple
lightening flickering at the top edge of the canvas. It’s
as if the graffiti and the ruins have been, just as Craig Owens
describes in the epigram above, “reabsorbed into the landscape.”
Describing his paintings as reflections of the “techno-sublime,”
Cheung’s worlds derive from globalization, where images
circulate widely, infiltrating and saturating even remote landscapes.
The child of Chinese immigrants, Cheung has always had to negotiate
between two cultures. His experience of belonging to more than
one place and in more than one community and grappling with the
simultaneously alienating and liberating effects of this multiplicity
is becoming more and more commonplace in today’s much-traversed
world. The kaleidoscopic, distorted, and reflected imagery of
his paintings are both dizzyingly delightful and darkly portentous,
suggesting a personal ambivalence that lies somewhere between
knowing oneself and questioning one’s position in the world.
Cheung’s mesmerizing sites are ultimately visual allegories
presented for our contemplation, negotiating between the present
and the future and encouraging a historical evaluation of today’s
culture.
That Cheung chooses to work in several media and draw from a diversity
of historical precedents—applying techniques as distinct
as collage, Chinese and Japanese ink brush work, photographic
transfer of appropriated imagery, and spray paint while referencing
such art historical moments as the Hudson River School and Chinese
landscape scrolls—is indicative of the work’s alignment
with the postmodern embrace of heterogeneity. Remaining deliberately
in the realm of painting, his willingness and comfort with quotation
in both imagery and technique suggest an affinity with Rauschenberg’s
combine paintings and many others thereafter who use appropriation
to complicate conventional readings of images. Craig Owens notes,
“Allegorical imagery is appropriated imagery; the allegorist
does not invent images but confiscates them. He lays claim to
the culturally significant, poses as its interpreter. And in his
hands the image becomes something other…he adds another
meaning to the image.” The complexity and visual impact
of Cheung’s work lie, in part, in what Owens points out
so eloquently about allegory: its understanding of ambiguity and
ability to draw out multiple meanings, or as Owens puts it, the
work, “…must remain forever suspended in its own uncertainty.”
Cheung’s landscapes suggest that although our understandings
of place may today be marked by amalgamation, fragmentation, and
a constant state of flux, we can nonetheless visualize sites that
are equal parts physical and digital, reality and perception.
Gordon Cheung received his MA in paintings from The Royal College
in London in 2001 and his BA from Central Saint Martins College
of Art and Design. He has been in numerous group exhibitions,
including the 2004 Liverpool Biennial and “Yes, I Am a Long
Way From Home” at the Nunnery in London. He recently completed
a residency at the Kyoto Art Centre Residency in Japan, the VASLResidency
in Pakistan, and Breathe Residency at the Chinese Arts Centre
in Manchester. His solo exhibition “Hollow Sunsets”
was at Houldsworth Gallery in London last year.
2005 text by:
Anne
Ellegood
Associate Curator
Hirshhorn
Museum & Sculpture Garden
Washington USA
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