18 January – 23 March 2008
The title of Gordon Cheung’s first solo exhibition at Chinese Arts Centre is a playful dark reference to the cut/paste techniques that he uses to depict post-apocalyptic landscapes. It also references ‘slow slicing’, a form of execution used in China from roughly AD 900 to its abolition in 1905. This method of execution became a fixture in the image of China among some Westerners. It appears in various romantic accounts of Chinese cruelty, such as Harold Lamb’s 1930s biography of Genghis Khan and some modern writers suggest that língchí was exaggerated in retellings to become the more sensationalistic ‘death by a thousand cuts’, attributed to mistranslation, cultural differences, racism or other factors. Nowadays the phrase “death of a thousand cuts” is used metaphorically to describe the gradual or incremental destruction of something, such as an institution, program or policy by repeated minor attacks. The term is also used in business management to describe a product or idea that is damaged or destroyed by too many minor changes.
Gordon Cheung’s solo show reflects his continued interests in power, belief systems and our obedience to them. Death by a Thousand Cuts, responds to the rise of China as potentially the next superpower, it’s affect on the world order and how their socialism is mutating into socialist capitalism. Cheung captures a sense of this by working with Chinese propaganda and acrobatic images converged with ideas of B-horror zombie movies.
