In The Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse, Gordon Cheung synthesises myth, history and contemporary crisis into an immersive, hallucinatory vision. Drawing on the symbolic power of the biblical Horsemen—Conquest, War, Famine and Death—Cheung reimagines these figures as spectral riders that dominate a fractured horizon. This work merges the iconic language of apocalypse with the vernacular of our era, using intense colour and shifting pictorial fields to evoke a world oscillating between utopia and collapse.

Across a vast, drifting sky, the horsemen appear in dynamic procession: their forms are fluid, hyper-chromatic and almost otherworldly, as if projected from a fractured digital dream. Below them, fragmented cityscapes, data-like surfaces and molten terrain unfold like the detritus of civilisation, recalling the volatile intersections of economics, conflict and global power structures that define the early twenty-first century.

Cheung’s imagery is informed by a wide range of sources—from utopian romantic painting and science fiction to contemporary news media—yet all converge here in a vision that confronts the viewer with both historical resonance and urgent relevance. The Horsemen transcend their biblical roots to become metaphors for forces shaping our present: violence and war, ecological and economic collapse, the pursuit and collapse of wealth, and the spectre of mortality itself.

The painting’s sweeping composition and textural complexity reflect Cheung’s broader practice, which probes the data-saturated condition of modern life and the uneasy tension between virtual and actual realities. In this apocalyptic tableau, the familiar and the fantastical collide, inviting a contemplation of civilisation’s precarious thresholds and the visions—prophetic, dystopian, hallucinatory—that emerge at those margins.