For Gordon Cheung’s first solo museum exhibition in the United States, worlds are colliding. The British artist merges physical and virtual universes into complex and mesmerizing landscapes reflecting a tumultuous society. Blending ink, pastels, photographs, acrylic gel, oil, gloss, and spray paint, Cheung’s media medley is as diverse as his thought process. Starting with an idea “in the back of my mind,” Cheung, a self-proclaimed child of the computer age, compiles images from a “digital palette” of news, video games, science fiction, graffiti, and famous paintings. He manipulates, collages, and paints dramatic scenes addressing themes of ecological challenge, technology, politics, and consumerism. In "The Raft," which references Theodore Géricault’s "The Raft of Medusa," Cheung parallels a cannibalistic disaster with capitalism. Floating on an abstract background of pink stock listings from the "London Financial Times" (a common background in his paintings), the raft, a digital paint-by-numbers shrouded in dense shadows, reveals a figure desperately waving a flag in a colorless void. In his new video installation "The Four Riders," Cheung portrays cowboys as the Four Horseman of the Apocalypse, riding bucking bulls on phosphorescent backgrounds, creating an almost hallucinogenic effect. The riders represent a romantic image of the pioneering spirit, or man’s will to overcome nature, but they also mask a history of violence, bloodshed and cruelty. But in truth these works are not fantasy; they record the fluidity among elements that have become combustible in the present. It seems that the narrowing ecological path we are on and economic boom-or-bust tsunamis are very real bases for modern-day terror.For Gordon Cheung’s first solo museum exhibition in the United States, worlds are colliding. The British artist merges physical and virtual universes into complex and mesmerizing landscapes reflecting a tumultuous society. Blending ink, pastels, photographs, acrylic gel, oil, gloss, and spray paint, Cheung’s media medley is as diverse as his thought process. Starting with an idea “in the back of my mind,” Cheung, a self-proclaimed child of the computer age, compiles images from a “digital palette” of news, video games, science fiction, graffiti, and famous paintings. He manipulates, collages, and paints dramatic scenes addressing themes of ecological challenge, technology, politics, and consumerism. In "The Raft," which references Theodore Géricault’s "The Raft of Medusa," Cheung parallels a cannibalistic disaster with capitalism. Floating on an abstract background of pink stock listings from the "London Financial Times" (a common background in his paintings), the raft, a digital paint-by-numbers shrouded in dense shadows, reveals a figure desperately waving a flag in a colorless void. In his new video installation "The Four Riders," Cheung portrays cowboys as the Four Horseman of the Apocalypse, riding bucking bulls on phosphorescent backgrounds, creating an almost hallucinogenic effect. The riders represent a romantic image of the pioneering spirit, or man’s will to overcome nature, but they also mask a history of violence, bloodshed and cruelty. But in truth these works are not fantasy; they record the fluidity among elements that have become combustible in the present. It seems that the narrowing ecological path we are on and economic boom-or-bust tsunamis are very real bases for modern-day terror.
