Gordon Cheung's Altered States

By Scott Andrews

The newest exhibition at ASU Art Museum features Gordon Cheung, a British born Chinese artist whose paintings fit in well with the Museum’s mission to consider international mid-career artists involved with social commentary. The works included are seventeen paintings loaned by Valley collector and ASU Art Museum supporter Stéphane Janssen and a four panel video piece provided by the artist.

Images sourced online from historic paintings, science fiction and news media are collected in what the artist calls his palette, then depicted in Sumi ink, acrylic, oil and spray paint in crazed mutations over a background of columns of numbers filling the signature pink pages of the Financial Times. Though the works seem prescient as comment on our recent global economic meltdown, the artist works from a further perspective. Cheung states, “I wasn’t choosing these works consciously due to their historical significance but rather responding to the ideas in the works that I felt were relevant to contemporary times and the themes that underlie all my work.”

Raphael Conversing with Adam and Eve is based on a print by London artist John Martin made in 1826 from his series for Milton’s Paradise Lost. The original etching in gray tones is replicated with hysteric coloration, reminiscent more of 1960’s psychedelia than staid bibliophilia. Cheung’s manipulation peels away connotations of the proper, the antique, literally coloring in the lost shock that a reader might have felt when Milton’s text was new—two centuries before Martin’s mezzotint was printed.

Cheung explains that the “series first drew my attention as a metaphor for our steps towards an ecological apocalypse. The original is about the fall of the rebel angels, Adam and Eve and Lucifer’s corruption of their purity leading to them being driven from Paradise. It was a series of paintings based on the poem by John Milton who interestingly focused the poem on Lucifer who in many ways we find ourselves empathizing with as he seems most ‘human’ with all [his] weaknesses and errors...The Paradise Lost series is mostly about the repetition of the ‘End of the World’ myths and reconfiguring it into our modern era of Capitalism that is taking us to the brink.”

Along with the paintings is a four panel video work “Four Riders,” that the artist refers to as animations. As in the paintings, hyper vibrant colors abound. The pattern manipulations, which recall the paintings, are clearly created by computer effects. Exhibition curator Heather Lineberry tells that Cheung believes “we live in a converged world between the actual and virtual worlds.”

This then, is realism. Always plugged in, our lives exist between the layers of a grand palimpsest, awaiting the scraper.

Altered States: Paintings by Gordon Cheung from the Stéphane Janssen Collection
January 9 – April 10, 2010
Talk by the artist, Conversations @11
Jan. 22 at 11 am.
Arizona State University Art Museum
Tenth Street and Mill Avenue
Tempe, AZ 85287-2911
Tel. 480.965.2787
Web: asuartmuseum.asu.edu