Gordon Cheung

Preview 21 Sept 2007, 7-9pm

This Autumn Gordon Cheung – emerging star of the British contemporary art scene – will be showing new and recent works at aspex.

"A grunt gets it when he's been in the shit too long," and that "it's like you're really seeing beyond." (Payback and Stars and Stripes photographer Rafterman explaining the 1000 yard stare – ‘Full Metal Jacket’ directed by Stanley Kubrick 1987)

The 1000 Yard Stare is a battlefield syndrome term referring to the combat stressed gaze of front line soldiers that gave one the impression that they were ever watchful out to the 1000 yard line as that was considered to be the extent of the danger zone. Later for American troops it was sometimes used, with a different intonation, to describe the vacant expression on the face of dope-heads just serving out their time.

Cheung’s super-real paintings capture psychedelic hallucinations between the virtual and actual realities of our globalised world reflecting how we entered the new millenium with one threatening wave of apocalypse after another harshly underlined by the 9/11 attacks, a global ‘War on Terror’ while the world also grappled with it’s fragile relationship to nature itself.

Cheung’s work is a poetic and disturbing reflection of the drama and trauma of contemporary life. Working with spray-paint, oils, arylics, pastels, pages of the Financial Times stock listings and ink he also makes references to popular culture such as cartoon characters and cinematic scenes appearing alongside images from mythology, iconic paintings, magazines and the internet.

In The 1000 Yard Stare Cheung will be showing a series of works from 2005 which include pieces such as Colliderscape 14 where FT print of the stock listings are overflowing a waterfall into a chasm, optimism brought into this dystopian scene in the form of a rainbow. Aspex has also commissioned Cheung to make a new work, on a military theme, incorporating 1950’s images of US staff watching nuclearr testing. As he describes it “people watching the Apocalypse”.

British born Chinese, Gordon Cheung’s parents moved from Hong kong to London in the 1960’s. Born in 1975, he studied at Central Saint Martins and the Royal College of Art. He exhibits internatinally and was in the largest and most ambitious survey of recent developments in art from the UK: The British Art Show 6. Nominated for the Laing solo award Gordon Cheung will be exhibiting newl

Gordon Cheung
The 1000 Yard Stare