A poetic exploration of the relationship between nature, culture, and power in the digital age. Through a series of paintings and sculptures, viewers are invited to contemplate the rise and fall of civilisations in the age of globalisation. The show is constructed around the concept of a Chinese garden with sculptures created from Financial Times newspapers which draw inspiration from traditional Chinese ‘scholar’s rocks’ or ‘spirit stones’. Embodying microcosms of landscapes they are meditative focal points between nature and civilisation.
Artist Statement
"The Garden of Perfect Brightness" solo exhibition at The Atkinson is a poetic exploration of the relationship between nature, culture, and power in the digital age.
Through a series of paintings and sculptures, viewers are invited to contemplate the rise and fall of civilisations in the age of globalisation. Complex interplays of destruction and renewal, natural and artificial, and the duality of the “in-between” Chinese Diaspora identity, are all brought to light in the backdrop of geopolitical and historical events, in our rapidly changing world where history is written by victors.
The show is constructed around the concept of a Chinese garden with sculptures created from Financial Times newspapers which draw inspiration from traditional Chinese ‘scholar’s rocks’ or ‘spirit stones’. Embodying microcosms of landscapes they are meditative focal points between nature and civilisation, the sculptures reflect on a world formed by datascapes shaped by the light speed movements of capital that creates both utopias and dystopias.
Surrounding the sculptures are paintings of landscapes and still lifes, composed of scenes from the 1744 Qianlong Emperor’s imperial album “40 Views of the Yuanming Yuan”. These paintings have been digitally reformed to hover like auroras over the top GDP cities of Modern China, providing a haunting contemporary juxtaposition to the historical imagery.
“The Garden of Perfect Brightness” is named after the English translation of the Yuanming Garden in Beijing. It was also known as the Old Summer Palace, a site of immense historical and cultural significance representing the pinnacle of artistic and cultural achievement in China that was tragically destroyed during the 1860’s 2nd Opium War. In a poignant reflection, the historical references paired with natural imagery offer a message of hope and renewal: a reminder of the beauty and impermanence of all things.
Biography
Born 1975 in London to Chinese parents, Gordon Cheung has developed an innovative approach to making art, which blurs virtual and actual reality to reflect on the existential questions of what it means to be human in civilisations with histories written by victors. Cheung raises questions and critiques the effects of global capitalism, its underlying mechanisms of power on our perception of identity, territory and sense of belonging. These narratives are refracted through the prisms of culture, mythology, religion, and politics into dreamlike spaces of urban surreal worlds that are rooted in his in-between identity.
Cheung graduated with a Bachelor of Fine Arts in Painting in 1998 from Central Saint Martins College of Art and Design in London and earned his Masters of Fine Arts in 2001 from the Royal College of Art in London. Select solo shows include Jack Shainman Gallery in New York, The Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse, The New Art Gallery Walsall, Walsall UK, The Light that Burns Twice as Bright, Cristea Gallery, London UK, Here Be Dragons, Nottingham Castle Museum and Art Gallery, Nottingham, UK and New Order Vanitas, Ann Norton Sculpture Gardens, West Palm Beach, FL, USA. His works are held in the collections of the Museum of Modern Art in New York, Hirshhorn Museum in Washington, D.C., the Whitworth Art Museum in Manchester, Royal College of Art in London, and the British Museum, amongst others. He lives and works in London.