Gordon Cheung - Contemporary Artist

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.

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.

City Limits 2004 enlarge / detail

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.

Brueghel's Highway 2004 enlarge / detail

"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

War of Reason (Detail) enlarge

Gordon Cheung studio view with War of Reason in background