Gordon Cheung: Consensual Halluci/nation | 17 September - 21 November 2026

Gordon Cheung’s practice interrogates the visual and ideological systems that shape global capitalism, power, and identity. Working primarily in sculpture, painting, and digital media; Cheung incorporates financial newspapers, maps, and digital iconography into densely layered compositions that collapse distinctions between abstraction and representation, materiality and image. His works often feature fractured landscapes, unstable architectures, and glitch-like disruptions that evoke both economic volatility and cultural dislocation.

Born in London to Chinese parents, Cheung draws on personal and geopolitical histories to examine how migration, finance, and technology intersect in the contemporary moment. By embedding source materials associated with commerce and information flow directly into the surface of the work, he exposes the infrastructures—both visible and invisible—that govern everyday life, and reflects on the existential questions of what it means to be human in civilisations with histories written by victors. The resulting paintings operate as speculative sites, where past and future, collapse and regeneration, coexist.

Cheung earned his BFA in Painting from Central Saint Martins, London, in 1998, followed by an MFA from the Royal College of Art in 2001. His work has been the subject of numerous solo exhibitions, including at The Atkinson, Southport, UK (2023); Ann Norton Sculpture Gardens, West Palm Beach, FL (2017); Nottingham Castle Museum & Art Gallery, Nottingham, UK (2016);The Whitaker, Rossendale, UK (2017); Arizona State University Art Museum, Tempe, AZ (2010); and The New Art Gallery Walsall, Walsall, UK (2009). Recent solo exhibitions include Close Gallery, Somerset (2026); Almine Rech, Paris (2022) and Shanghai (2024), and Galerie du Monde, Hong Kong (2025). His work has also been featured in exhibitions 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 numerous major public collections, including the British Museum, London; British Council, London; Royal College of Art, London; Government Art Collection,London; Museum of Modern Art, New York; Whitworth, Manchester; Yale Center for British Art,Connecticut; Asian Art Museum, San Francisco; Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden,Washington, D.C.; Minneapolis Institute of Art, Minnesota; ASU Art Museum, Arizona; Knoxville Museum of Art, Tennessee; New Art Gallery Walsall, UK; Speed Art Museum, Kentucky; Hood Museum of Art, New Hampshire; Museum of Contemporary Art Kraków, Poland; Deji Art Museum, Nanjing; the University of Manchester, Manchester; and Manchester Museum, Manchester.

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.