'The Garden of Perfect Brightness': Artist Talk at The Atkinson

Named after the Yuanming Gardens in Beijing’s Summer Palace, ‘The Garden of Perfect Brightness’ is an exhibition of new work and the culmination of research into geopolitical and historical events including the Opium Wars, the rise and fall of civilisations and 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.

On the museum’s Summer Exhibitions Launch Day, Gordon Cheung toured visitors through the show – introducing the exhibition and a closer look at his artistic process.

Date: Saturday 3 June 2023 – Saturday 9 September 2023

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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.

: Gordon Cheung, Engraved Moon and Unfolding Clouds, 2023. Financial newspaper, archival inkjet, acrylic and sand on linen. 150 x 200cm.

Links

Bursting Blooms Link Modernity and History in Gordon Cheung’s Decadent Still-Life Paintings – Kate Mothes, Colossal, 23 May 2023 – thisiscolossal.com/2023/05/gordon-cheung-still-life-paintings

Gordon Cheung: The Garden of Perfect Brightness – Working Statement. 13 April 2023 – theatkinson.co.uk/2023/04/gordon-cheung

Collecting Guide: Scholars’ rocks. The fantastically-shaped stones that have inspired China’s poets and painters. – Christie’s, 23 November 2015 – christies.com/features/Collecting-Guide-Scholars-Rocks-6815-1.aspx

Biography

: Gordon Cheung in his studio with Chinese Scholar Rock sculptures

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.

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