Gordon Cheung works across several disciplines simultaneously, drawing on the tensions between them as a generative resource. The London-born artist, whose parents came from Hong Kong, has spent the past two decades developing a practice that moves with unusual fluency across Chinese philosophy and aesthetics, European art history, the language of global finance and the visual grammar of digital technology. The results are works that, at first encounter, look like classical landscapes and, on closer examination, reveal themselves to be something altogether more complex and contemporary.
Many Worlds, One Mind, a major survey exhibition opening at Close Gallery on 6 June and running until 15 August 2026, brings together key works from across Cheung’s practice in what the gallery describes as a rare opportunity to encounter the full breadth of an artist whose thinking crosses economics, art history, technology and cultural identity without privileging any one of these domains over the others. The exhibition makes a strong case for Cheung as one of the more genuinely singular figures working in British painting today.
The most immediately striking material fact of his practice is his use of Financial Times stock listings as a ground for his paintings. Pages of share prices, the daily numerical record of global capitalism’s movements, are embedded into the foundation of the image, their dense columns of figures visible beneath the painted and digitally constructed surfaces that Cheung builds across them. The gesture is not merely conceptual. It has formal consequences that run through everything above it, giving the works a texture and a substructure that speaks of the economic systems underpinning the apparently timeless landscapes they depict. The romantic horizons and Dutch Golden Age echoes that characterise much of Cheung’s visual language are, in this sense, literally built on the infrastructure of financial speculation.
Gordon Cheung Windon 2020
That relationship between historical imagery and contemporary economic reality is central to the research that drives his practice. Cheung has long been drawn to the origins of global trade and the early formations of modern capitalism, and particularly to the speculative markets of seventeenth-century Holland. The tulip mania of the 1630s, often cited as the first modern financial bubble, recurs as a reference point across his work, its resonance with our own era of accelerated digital markets and algorithmic trading providing a historical lens through which the present becomes more legible rather than more distant. The Dutch Golden Age of painting emerged from the same commercial culture that produced the tulip bubble, and Cheung’s formal engagement with that tradition carries an awareness of this entanglement, giving his landscapes a critical edge absent from mere pastiche.
His technical methods are as hybrid as his conceptual interests. What appears painterly in Cheung’s work is frequently the result of processes that combine digital technologies, scientific experimentation and sculptural construction, including elements of three-dimensional printing and digitally mediated surfaces. The distinction between the painted and the generated, the analogue and the digital, is deliberately difficult to locate, and that difficulty is productive. The landscapes he creates are hybrid territories in which data and imagination coexist, where classical imagery dissolves into digital structures and historical reference is reframed through the language of technological innovation. They feel simultaneously ancient and futuristic, which is precisely the temporal disorientation that Cheung is pursuing.
The cultural displacement that informs his work is not experienced as loss but as a generative space where histories, aesthetics, and philosophies meet. Growing up between the traditions of East and West, with Chinese philosophy and aesthetics on one side and the long arc of European painting on the other, gave Cheung a position from which neither tradition could be taken entirely for granted, and from which both could be examined with a certain critical distance. His practice reflects the experience of living in that in-between space and finding it productive rather than destabilising.
Cheung studied painting at Central Saint Martins before completing his MFA at the Royal College of Art in 2001. His work is held in collections that reflect the international reach of his reputation, among them the Museum of Modern Art in New York, the Hirshhorn Museum in Washington, the Whitworth Art Gallery in Manchester and the British Museum. Previous solo exhibitions have taken his work to Jack Shainman Gallery in New York, Nottingham Castle Museum and Gallery and the Ann Norton Sculpture Gardens in Florida.
Many Worlds, One Mind offers the most comprehensive opportunity yet to follow the development of a practice that has been accumulating depth and complexity over the past two decades. In Cheung’s hands, landscape becomes a site where the invisible architectures of contemporary life, trade, belief, markets and memory are made visible as both poetic and political. It is work that rewards the sustained attention this exhibition makes possible.
Gordon Cheung: Many Worlds, One Mind is at Close Gallery from 6 June to 15 August 2026.