Gordon Cheung in Conversation with Carrie Scott
Wednesday 7 October, 6.30-8.30pm
To mark the opening, Gordon will be in in conversation with curator Currie Scott for an intimate evening salon exploring the ideas and processes behind the work.
Between Empires is Open by Appointment
8 October - 6 November 2026
Please email Richard Scarry, richard@closeltd.com
BETWEEN EMPIRES is a unique presentation of work by Gordon Cheung. The show presents his acclaimed New Order Vanitas series alongside his Glitch works, both drawing on Old Master painting to explore cultural memory, mythology, personal identity and the shifting cycles of power and civilisation. This follows on from his recent solo exhibition at CLOSE, ‘Many Worlds, One Mind’.
Cheung's process uses an algorithm to reorder the pixels of photographed still life, often Dutch Golden Age flower paintings from the Rijksmuseum, so that the images can theoretically be reassembled, like a hyper-complex jigsaw, suggesting not repetition but the way history rhymes.
The New Order series traces a line from Tulip Mania and the birth of modern capitalism through to the 2008 financial crisis, rendered as a kind of dissolving digital sand that recalls Gerhard Richter's blurred paintings. The result is a meditation on our data-saturated age, memory and history corroding, and rewritten, in the hands of the victors. Cheung’s practice is gaining world wide recognition including a recent acquisition to M+ Hong Kong.