Opening Thursday, September 17, 2026 | 5–7 PM
Kavi Gupta | Washington Blvd., Chicago
Artist News: Kavi Gupta is pleased to announce Consensual Halluci/nation, Gordon Cheung’s first solo exhibition with the gallery, opening Thursday, September 17, 2026, in Chicago.
Drawing on Cheung’s experience growing up between London and Hong Kong, Consensual Halluci/nation examines the entanglement of technology, global finance, colonial history, and systems of collective belief. Across painting, sculpture, installation, 3D printing, and emerging technologies including artificial intelligence, Cheung transforms the vast and often intangible systems that shape contemporary life into materially dense landscapes that can be physically encountered and contemplated.
The exhibition takes its title from William Gibson’s description of cyberspace in Neuromancer as “a consensual hallucination experienced daily by billions of legitimate operators, in every nation.” For Cheung, the phrase extends beyond the digital realm to describe the shared systems of belief that underpin finance, technology, national identity, and historical narratives. His work considers how enormous structures of value and power come into being through collective agreement, and how quickly those systems can fracture.
Cheung’s understanding of capitalism as a form of “consensual hallucination” developed alongside his coming of age during the transition into the digital age, the millennium bug, the tech stock crash, and the collapses of Enron and WorldCom. The financial rupture of 2008, together with the events of 9/11 and the War on Terror, further shaped his interrogation of the narratives through which civilization, progress, and power are constructed.
These concerns inform Cheung’s concept of the “technosublime,” in which technology and the systems it produces assume the overwhelming scale once associated with nature within the Romantic Sublime. The internet, financial markets, and accelerating technological networks become contemporary forces of awe and instability. Within these systems, Cheung constructs speculative landscapes where capital, technological acceleration, ecological imagery, historical memory, and collapse converge.
Central to the artist’s practice is his longstanding use of stock listings from the Financial Times. Transformed through crushing, folding, layering, painting, digital manipulation, and sculptural processes, the newspaper becomes both material and metaphor: a physical record of information and capital moving at extraordinary speed. Cheung compresses these pages until they acquire the density of stone, forming sculptural objects that evoke Chinese scholar’s rocks and spirit stones, traditionally associated with contemplation and the natural landscape. Here, ancient forms of looking and reflection are recast through the visual language of global finance and technological systems.
Spray paint, sand, acrylic, digital imagery, AI-generated imagery, varnish, and hand-embellished 3D-printed motifs further complicate Cheung’s surfaces. At a distance, the works evoke cosmic vistas, speculative environments, and futuristic landscapes; at close range, their dense materiality reveals the physical labor required to transform streams of information into objects. The distinction between screen and pigment, nature and civilization, and information and matter begins to dissolve.
Consensual Halluci/nation continues Cheung’s sustained investigation into what happens when systems ordinarily operating beyond human perception are slowed down and made tangible. Capital moves at light speed; in Cheung’s work, it is forced into weight, silence, and slow time. His landscapes become meditations on human experience within systems that appear both immovable and profoundly fragile, and on the ways histories continue to be shaped by those who construct and control their narratives.
Cheung was recently featured in Thresholds of Representation at Kavi Gupta | Washington Blvd., Chicago, where his lush botanical still lifes, printed porcelain, machine-carved Chinese scholar’s rocks, AI-generated imagery, and luminous landscapes demonstrated his ongoing investigation into the shifting boundaries between the natural and synthetic, historical and speculative.
Gordon Cheung received his BFA in Painting from Central Saint Martins, London, in 1998 and his MFA from the Royal College of Art, London, in 2001. His work has been the subject of solo exhibitions at institutions including The New Art Gallery Walsall, Walsall; Arizona State University Art Museum, Tempe; Nottingham Castle Museum & Art Gallery, Nottingham; Ann Norton Sculpture Gardens, West Palm Beach; The Whitaker, Rossendale; and The Atkinson, Southport. Recent exhibitions include Many Worlds, One Mind at Close Gallery, Somerset (2026), Peaceful Retreat at Almine Rech, Shanghai (2024), Rise and Fall at House of Fine Art, London (2024), and New Territories at Galerie du Monde, Hong Kong (2025).
His work has also been exhibited at the Centre Pompidou-Metz, Royal Academy of Arts, ArtScience Museum, Yale Center for British Art, and the 56th Venice Biennale. Cheung’s work is held in the permanent collections of institutions including the Museum of Modern Art, New York; British Museum, London; Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden, Washington, D.C.; Asian Art Museum, San Francisco; Yale Center for British Art, New Haven; Minneapolis Institute of Art; and Whitworth, Manchester, among numerous other public collections.
Consensual Halluci/nation opens at Kavi Gupta | Washington Blvd. on Thursday, September 17, 2026, from 5–7 PM.
