Gordon Cheung, Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse, 2009.
Gordon Cheung.
Kavi Gupta is pleased to announce Gordon Cheung’s first solo exhibition with the gallery, Consensual Halluci/nation, opening September 17, 2026, from 5-8pm in Chicago.
Drawing on the artist’s experience growing up between London and Hong Kong, Consensual Halluci/nation examines the entanglement of technology, global finance, colonial history, and systems of belief. Born in London to parents from Hong Kong and a twenty ninth generation Cheung, the artist’s practice has developed from a sustained engagement with the cultural, economic, and technological transformations that have defined the late twentieth and early twenty-first centuries.
Cheung came of age during a period marked by the transition into the digital age, the millennium bug, the tech stock crash, and the collapse of Enron and WorldCom. These early manifestations of financial systems built upon collective belief became important precedents for his understanding of capitalism as a form of “consensual hallucination” vast structures of value that exist because millions of people agree to believe in numbers on screens. The subsequent economic rupture of 2008, alongside the events of 9/11 and the War on Terror, further informed his interrogation of the grand narratives through which histories of civilization are constructed and understood.
From these fractures emerged Cheung’s concept of the “technosublime,” in which technology assumes the role once occupied by nature within the Romantic Sublime. Where the Sublime traditionally overwhelmed the individual through encounters with the vastness and power of the natural world, Cheung considers the overwhelming scale of contemporary technological and financial systems. The internet, itself born from the nuclear age as a decentralized network designed to survive annihilation, becomes both subject and metaphor for a world defined by constant technological flux. Within these systems, Cheung constructs 3D landscapes in which power, capital, technological acceleration, and collapse converge.
September 17, 2026 through November 21, 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.
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.