Gordon Cheung UK, b. 1975
Sleepwalker, 2023
Financial Times newspaper, wood glue and polystyrene on thermoplastic polymer
23 1/2 x 19 1/2 x 12 in.
(60 x 50 x 30 cm)
(60 x 50 x 30 cm)
9307
The sculptures takes the form of a traditional Chinese scholars rock, a microcosm of landscape and a meditative object that bridges nature and civilisation. Formed from compressed Financial Times newspapers,...
The sculptures takes the form of a traditional Chinese scholars rock, a microcosm of landscape and a meditative object that bridges nature and civilisation. Formed from compressed Financial Times newspapers, it becomes a mountain rock like mass resting on an inverted cloud base that echoes its contours, creating a suspended zone between earth and heaven.
Its surface is sanded back to reveal layers of text that appear like geological strata, evoking deep time, a landscape of information shaped by the light speed flows of global capital that generate both utopian dreams and dystopian realities encapsulating the idea of ancient futures.
It can also be read through what Mark Fisher described as the hauntological condition, the sense of being trapped among the ruins of lost futures, where the past persists as a phantom within the present. By merging the language of ancient scholars rocks with financial newsprint, the work collapses temporal boundaries so that history, technology, and myth circulate within the same loop. It is both relic and prophecy, a site of contemplation where the simulation of the romantic sublime landscape has been rendered into the technosublime. If the traditional sublime was meant to bring us closer to the divine expressed in the power of nature then the technosublime invites meditation on what shape or narrative of the divine might be in the datascapes that flow through all of us in our modernity.
In this liminal zone between natural and digital worlds, the work captures our contemporary shifting perceptions of time and space, and how our humanity continues to inhabit the accelerating terrain of the digital age
Its surface is sanded back to reveal layers of text that appear like geological strata, evoking deep time, a landscape of information shaped by the light speed flows of global capital that generate both utopian dreams and dystopian realities encapsulating the idea of ancient futures.
It can also be read through what Mark Fisher described as the hauntological condition, the sense of being trapped among the ruins of lost futures, where the past persists as a phantom within the present. By merging the language of ancient scholars rocks with financial newsprint, the work collapses temporal boundaries so that history, technology, and myth circulate within the same loop. It is both relic and prophecy, a site of contemplation where the simulation of the romantic sublime landscape has been rendered into the technosublime. If the traditional sublime was meant to bring us closer to the divine expressed in the power of nature then the technosublime invites meditation on what shape or narrative of the divine might be in the datascapes that flow through all of us in our modernity.
In this liminal zone between natural and digital worlds, the work captures our contemporary shifting perceptions of time and space, and how our humanity continues to inhabit the accelerating terrain of the digital age