Immortal Nature - an interview with Gordon Cheung

Immortal Nature - an interview with Gordon Cheung

01 February, 2012
by: Tom Jeffreys

Tom Jeffreys talks Armageddon, financial meltdown and Mithraic cult rituals with one of London's most brilliant artists, Gordon Cheung.

According to popular myth, the Mayans predicted that the world would come to an end on 21st December 2012. It's not the first time Armageddon has been predicted and it almost certainly won't be the last, but, as artist Gordon Cheung tells me, “the idea is actually a Western construct”. Most Mayan scholars have dismissed the whole thing as a misrepresentation, but, nonetheless, “it's part of a very strong kind of folklore. “The idea of the apocalypse is almost like a collective thought about mortality.”

We're sitting in the artist's studio in Victoria, above contemporary art gallery Edel Assanti, who are currently hosting Immortal Nature – an exhibition curated by Cheung that directly responds to these eschatological predictions. Spread across the gallery's three floors, the show features work across a range of media – from Alexander Hoda's anti-classical totem to Hew Locke's kitsch assemblage god, Kelly Richardson's reflective video piece, Piers Secunda's Chinese puzzle ball made out of paint, and, most strikingly perhaps, Richard Mosse's incredible photographs that utilise military-grade infrared film to create landscapes of astounding beauty but imbued with a latent sense of foreboding.

Aside from the '2012 phenomenon', this is an extremely timely exhibition. Two other simultaneous shows – Utopia at Hoxton Art Gallery and Back to the Future at Breese Little – are also exploring broadly similar concerns, and there's a larger sense in which the world as we know it might be coming to an end. Certainly the self-satisfied apathy that accompanied The End of History now looks to be horribly misplaced.

Cheung looks back to 2009 as a turning point: specifically, the “two weeks where those nine 'too big to fail' companies all collapsed.” He elaborates: “These were like corporate behemoths, monolithic in scale. If we could visualise them beyond the skyscrapers that they occupy, they tower over the financial world, they cast a massive shadow. And they collapsed, on what would be a Biblical scale: it was a kind of a corporate apocalypse.”

Cheung has been exploring these kind of ideas for some years now – in a sense you could argue that his works prefigured the current financial climate. In the mid to late nineties, Cheung was looking at “a more utopian sensibility – the communications and digital revolution”, but all that changed around 2000: the dot-com bubble and the Millennium bug. These “instances of a technophobic global hysteria” were major turning points for his work, as well as 9/11, the War on Terror and the collapse of Enron and WorldCom.

But it's not just contemporary financial meltdown; Cheung combines figures from classical mythology and an appreciation for the importance of art history with a hyper-real computer game aesthetic to create works that dramatise the occasionally violent conjunction of different systems of knowledge, power and ideology. His worlds hang together as an elegant, oft-enchanting whole, but threaten, like our own, to collapse at any moment. Full-scale system failure is an ever-present possibility.

Interestingly, Cheung's splicing together of such systems and structures is actually embodied in his creative process and techniques. “When I started at St Martins,” he explains, “I wanted to produce paintings without paint, but still using the principles of painting. I ended up substituting paint for collage, so I was painting with information.” The collaging process now combines digital printing (from a massive archive of internet-sourced images) as well as ink, acrylic gel and spray paint. It's also roughly the same approach that he's been using for recent video works (like the eerily hypnotic The Four Riders) and sculptures – there's one in the studio that features a large stuffed snowy owl bought on eBay.

Cheung does now use paint again, but not applied in a traditional way: while I'm here, he carefully peels a thick smear of paint from off a plastic sheet and sticks it onto one of a series of pieces inspired by the Dutch tulip bubble that he's currently working on. It's a collaging both of aesthetics and ideas.

This is encapsulated in the use of FT stock listings – something which started back in 1994. Not only do they provide a kind of grid-like basis to the works, but they also represent, as Cheung puts it, “our new virtual landscape, one that dominates all of our existence”. A structure both visually and intellectually, they allow Cheung's images to occupy a world of latent political discontent, without the need to take an explicit position. Because Cheung is clearly somebody who thinks deeply about the current political climate, but whose invocations of classical myth and legend elevates his work to something more than merely contemporary.

This ability to combine the specificity of the present with the repetitions of history looks set to continue to inform Cheung's future work. He's already working towards a solo show at Edel Assanti in October, for which he has been researching Mithraic cult rituals. Expect sacrificed bulls and “gushing hot blood pouring over the worshippers” and maybe even a bomb-suit made out of felt. If the Mayans do turn out to be right, it could be the last exhibition you ever see – it'd be a fitting way to end.

Immortal Nature is at Edel Assanti until 3rd March 2012.

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Tom Jeffreys