Gordon Cheung's Speculative Perspective (2024) is exhibited in Say it with Flowers at the White Conduit Project, curated by Paul Carey-Kent and Yuki Miyake
Date: 4 December 2024 to 26 January 2025
Location: 1 White Conduit Street Islington London N1 9EL
Think of flowers and you think of beauty, of romance... and, especially if they are painted flowers, of death: ever since its Dutch 17th century heyday, the Vanitas tradition has been using the transitory nature of flowers to stand in for how all of us will die. But enough of that: 'Say It With Flowers’ sees a dozen artists tackle other subjects through flowers: modesty, sex, economics, menopause, cultural difference, fertility, consumerism, mystery, ageing, darkness, economics, culture, shyness, ageing, human relations with flowers, epistemology, and individual destiny… Then there's the matter of east meets west, and a link to Ikebana, the Japanese art of flower arranging.
Featured artists: John Peter Askew, Ingrid Berthon-Moine, Gordon Cheung, Tania Kovats, Sophie Layton, Sarah Lederman, Lana Locke, William Mackrell, Hannah Maybank, Jiro Osuga, Rebecca Partridge, Tomoko Yoneda
Gordon Cheung: Speculative Perspective, 2024
'Speculative Perspective' was a notorious episode in 17th-century Dutch history, in which the trading of tulip bulbs became so extreme that the price of one flower would sell for ten mes the annual wage of a skilled worker. Cheung presents a 3D print of a tulip on a layer of collaged stock lis ngs newsprint from the 'Financial Times'. ‘To me’, says Cheung, ‘it is a surreal metaphor of the madness of crowds, to spend the price of a house on a tulip bulb. Despite believing ourselves to be ra onal, the same impulses of greed take hold of the minds of many’. There are lessons we have yet to learn despite all the bubbles that have come and gone over the past 400 years.
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White Conduit Projects | Contemporary Art Gallery
