Gordon Cheung is featured in "From Tulip Mania to Kat Hing Wai: Gordon Cheung’s Global Outlook in the In-Between" by Vivienne Chow in The Culturist.
“I felt a kind of pressure—as if, as an ethnic minority student, you ‘had to’ make work about diaspora, migration, the loss of home, exile, or return. White students weren’t asked to, so I’ve always resisted making this part of my work.” — Gordon Cheung
As tens of thousands of Hongkongers move to the UK to start new lives, contemporary artist Gordon Cheung has taken the opposite route—relocating from Britain to Hong Kong. Partnering with local gallery gdm, he has set up a studio in Wong Chuk Hang. His work has recently appeared in a group exhibition at Tai Kwun Contemporary, and an earlier large-scale piece has entered the M+ collection—an encouraging signal for his Hong Kong chapter.
“Coming to Hong Kong and receiving such a welcome—it really warms my heart,” Gordon says.
I first met Gordon over a decade ago, when Art Basel had just begun in Hong Kong and his UK gallery brought him to the fair. I was working at an English-language newspaper then, and we ended up sharing a taxi to World-Wide House in Central. He was already a passionate young artist, curious about Hong Kong. Though born and raised in the UK and never having lived here, he has long thought of Hong Kong as home—his parents are from an earlier generation of Hong Kong migrants, and his ties to the city run deep.
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Born in the former colonial metropole and descended from Hong Kong migrants, Gordon Cheung engages geopolitics—especially the overlooked memories of Hong Kong’s colonial past. In recent years he has travelled frequently in search of his roots, tracing his family history and discovering that he is a 29th-generation descendant of a Cheung clan in the New Territories, with his mother’s lineage reaching back nearly 800 years to the Song dynasty. These reflections feed directly into his practice. In his solo exhibition Gordon Cheung: New Territories at gdm Hong Kong last autumn, he used Financial Times stock listings to construct Gatekeeper, a replica of the village gate of Kat Hing Wai—his mother’s ancestral walled village. During the 1899 “Six-Day War,” British troops removed the gate; it was later returned in 1925.
“The British eventually returned the gate (in 1925), but I want to ask: when people pass through it, are they friends or invaders? And what does it mean when nations seize what isn’t theirs—especially in a place like Hong Kong, a former British colony that was never part of Britain proper?” His questions resonate with ongoing debates on decolonisation.
Text translated from original in Chinese. Courtesy of Vivienne Chow and The Culturist.
Images: Gordon Cheung: New Territories, gdm Hong Kong, 2025 (installation view). Photography by Felix Wong.
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The Culturist | “From Tulip Mania to Kat Hing Wai: Gordon Cheung’s Global Outlook in the In-Between”
