Gordon Cheung's Worldview

For Gordon Cheung, art is a channel for expressing his political vision of the world. The use of new technologies such as AI and 3D printing are combined with images of still lifes and landscapes, borrowed from European and Chinese pictorial traditions.
The paintings on display present classical views taken from the Qianlong Emperor's Album Forty Scenes of the Yuanmingyuan dating back to 1744. The still life compositions recall the Dutch tradition of the Golden Age, while the cityscapes in the foreground derive from Google's 3D map data of the top 40 Chinese provinces by GDP, transformed into desolate lunar landscapes with spray-painted sand. The final result generates a deliberate effect of surreal disorientation in the observer, a dramatic way of representing the cultural changes that characterize our era.