Jack Shainman Gallery is pleased to present British Born Chinese artist Gordon Cheung’s first solo gallery show in the USA. His dual background has fuelled his interest in paradoxically belonging and not to both cultures, a condition that led him to focus his work on existence in the artificial landscape of globalization. For Cheung we are all in an in-between state.
Using Financial Times stock listings as a ground in his multi-media paintings Cheung depicts spaces inspired by 19th-century Romantic landscape paintings and Science Fiction. The listings are a metaphor for the dominant global economic ideology that maps the torrential streams of capital around the world. Cheung’s paintings are ‘virtual-reality environments’ where ‘faith’ in the numbers of the stock exchange to deliver a ‘Promised Land’ dictates our lives. An overarching theme of his work is of the ‘techno-sublime’; instead of an overwhelming experience of nature bringing us closer to God, the visual rhetoric of the sublime has exchanged to omnipotent information which overwhelms us with an artificial landscape.