Gordon Cheung featured in FUTURISTIC DRAGON, interviewed by John-Paul Pryor.
The British-Chinese artist Gordon Cheung dives into the overwhelm of our age and glides fluidly between global economics, art history and cutting-edge tech to reflect on the what it means to be human in the modern era. At the centre of Cheung’s work lies an expansive curiosity about the invisible structures that govern our lives in late-capitalism, and many of his works are built on pages of Financial Times stock listings, folding the rhythm of global capital into the literal substrate of his images. From this ledgered ground he assembles shimmering vistas that at first read as classical-romantic horizons – rich with echoes of the Dutch Golden Age and fragments of collective art‑historical memory – only for closer inspection to reveal their ultra-contemporary manufacture.
What reads as painterliness in the work actually emerges from experimental technology – landscapes become liminal terrains where data, markets and imagination intersect; classical motifs dissolve into structurally derived digital forms, and historical citation is translated through the grammar of innovation. As such, the work occupies a simultaneously archaic and speculative temporal fold – existing where art history, financial infrastructure and cultural identity coalesce into a strange visual economy.
Under Cheung’s hand, art is both societal diagnostic instrument and keen poetic device: it exposes the hidden architectures behind contemporary life and reframes familiar landscapes and cultural motifs, material and imagined, as alien sites of interrogation. The sometimes near-psychedelic results of this deconstructive process are searching, skeptical and unmistakably of our moment. In this interview with FUTURISTIC DRAGON the artist, whose works hang in major institutions across the globe, discusses duality, hope and speculative futures, and tells us why love remains a powerful act of resistance.
Excerpt from: "Acts of Resistance: Gordon Cheung | The Acclaimed Artist On Control And The Invisible Apparatus of Existence".
Text courtesy of FUTURISTIC DRAGON.
Images:
(1) Gordon Cheung, New Territories, 2025
(2) Gordon Cheung, The Abyss Stares Back, 2015
(3) Gordon Cheung, Fifty Solar Waves, 2025
Learn more --
https://www.futuristicdragon.com/gordon-cheung
