GORDON CHEUNG | MANY WORLDS, ONE MIND

This summer, CLOSE Gallery presents a major survey exhibition by Gordon Cheung, on view 6 June - 15 August 2026.

There are artists whose work reflects a single discipline, and there are those whose thinking moves restlessly across many territories. Gordon Cheung belongs firmly to the latter. Raised in London within a family of Hong Kong heritage, Cheung’s work emerges from a rich intersection of cultures and ideas. His practice reflects the experience of displacement not as loss, but as a generative space where histories, aesthetics and philosophies meet.

Growing up between the traditions of East and West, Cheung developed a visual language that moves fluidly between classical art history and contemporary technological innovation. His work carries the influence of Chinese philosophy and aesthetics, while simultaneously engaging with the long arc of European painting, global economics and the forces that shape modern civilisation.

At the centre of Cheung’s work lies an expansive curiosity about systems and the invisible structures that govern belief, value and power. His research frequently turns to the origins of global trade and the early formations of modern capitalism, including the speculative markets of seventeenth-century Holland and the famous tulip mania often cited as the first financial bubble. These historical moments resonate strongly with our own era of accelerated global markets and digital economies.

Many of Cheung’s works are constructed upon pages of stock listings from the Financial Times, embedding the pulse of global finance into the very foundation of the image. Across this ground he constructs landscapes that at first appear reminiscent of classical European painting, romantic horizons, echoes of the Dutch Golden Age, and fragments of art historical memory. Yet closer examination reveals something entirely contemporary.

Cheung’s works are often produced through a complex synthesis of digital technologies, scientific processes and sculptural construction, including elements of 3D printing and digitally mediated surfaces. What initially appears painterly is in fact the result of advanced technological experimentation. The landscapes become hybrid territories where data, economics and imagination coexist.

Within these works, illusion and reality continually shift. Classical imagery dissolves into digital structures; historical references are reframed through the language of modern innovation. The result is a body of work that feels both ancient and futuristic landscapes of speculation where art history, finance and cultural identity converge.

Born in London in 1975 to parents from Hong Kong, Cheung studied painting at Central Saint Martins before completing his Master of Fine Art at Royal College of Art in 2001. His work is held in major international public collections including the Museum of Modern Art, the Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden, the Whitworth Art Gallery and the British Museum.

Many Worlds, One Mind brings together key works from across Cheung’s practice, offering a rare opportunity to encounter the breadth of an artist whose thinking moves across economics, art history, technology and culture. Through Cheung’s work we are invited to consider how the systems that shape our world trade, belief, markets and memory continue to define the landscapes we inhabit, both real and imagined.

In Cheung’s hands, art becomes a lens through which the invisible architectures of contemporary life are revealed poetic, questioning and profoundly of our time.

ABOUT THE ARTIST

Born 1975 in London to Chinese parents, contemporary multi-media artist 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.