Gordon Cheung

Gordon Cheung is of Hong Kong origin and born in London 1975 where he lives and works. I saw his work for the first time at the Keith Talent Gallery in London in 2002.

"Cheung’s paintings capture the hallucinations between the virtual and actual realities of a globalised world oscillating between Utopia and Dystopia."(gordoncheung.com)

"I use the Financial Times newspaper stock listings as I think of the stock market as a global dream-world that literally flows through all of us. This for me is a contemporary form of landscape from where I take inspiration and fuse images from the Internet on computer before printing directly onto sections of the stock listings to jigsaw back together on canvas.

When I started using the stock listings around 12 years ago we were going through a digital and communications revolution. Mobile phone technology and the Internet were being made readily available and this totally reconfigured our perception of space time into a state of constant flux. There was talk about globalisation, cyberspace, global villages, information superhighways and digital frontiers – we experienced a kind of digital euphoria over the prospect of a potential Utopia. This of course dissipated with the tech stock dot com millionaire crash which was followed by the techno-hysteria over the Millennium bug. We then experienced the twin tower attacks that consequently gave us the War on Terror. So for me I am taking inspiration from what is around us rooted in that Utopic technological revolution and the consequent threatening waves of apocalypse.

If you look through the body of work recurring motifs do exist such as the ruinous skyscrapers, luminous voids and rainbows. They’re all symbols of hope and despair brought together into a beautiful dark ambiguity."(full interview)

www.gordoncheung.com