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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. |
| Gordon
Cheung with Technophobia
in background / Photo by Rui
Matsunaga |
| 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.
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His paintings are
also a complex mix of collage, ink, pastels, print, oil, gloss
and spray paint. Sepia images seem to float in an indeterminate
background of stock listings punctuated by luminous voids of colour
and drenched in dense black ink. Visually pleasurable like a hypnotic
mandelbrot pattern, they assertively shift your perceptions between
illusion to reality. The cohesive image dissipating into the abstract
lists of the Financial Times as you move closer to investigate
the hallucinatory surface; the whole landscape literally cascading
with numbers. We are presented with a feeling that the colour
has drained into the pools or that the whole image is waiting
to be computer rendered with smooth surfaces. He intentionally
fractures the pictorial elements, so that the blurred boundaries
and borders between them become perceptive spaces where we can
dwell and raise deconstructive questions about contemporary landscape.
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| City Limits 2004 enlarge
/ detail |
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He is interested in the notion of datascapes that saturate our
environment; as we become more dependently hardwired with technologies
to maintain our modern life-styles we in turn electronically merge
into a virtual environment. Think beyond the materiality of our
technologies to the ethereal mobile phone signals, radio waves
and the zeroes and ones permeating our physical world, forming
a landscape of information where streams of data allow us to traverse
and access virtual dimensions.
The communications and digital revolution have collapsed notions
of time and distance into the instant, altering our existence
and reconfiguring our perceptions of time and space into a state
of constant flux.
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| "Essentially
the paintings can be understood as hyper-paint-by-numbers depicting
virtual landscapes oscillating between utopia and dystopia",
Cheung says. "They reveal the fractures in the glossy surfaces
of modern life so that we might slip beyond to the emergent patterns
and underbelly of what shapes our world. They reflect the techno-sublime
where information overwhelms the individual causing a flickering
perception of realities blurring between the virtual and actual.”
In Cheung’s mesmerising, phantasmogoric view of the world,
he presents to us the great chasms between virtual and actual
realities fused as a brave new world of technology and myth. Cheung
challenges himself to explore routes for painting to extend and
expand the ‘inbetween’ so that in his own words we
can ‘lay down our historical dead at the funeral of painting
and move towards the future’.
Text (abridged) by,
Charlie G Hare 2005 |
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