Petals and pixels.

Ahead of multi-media artist Gordon Cheung’s forthcoming survey Many Worlds, One Mind at CLOSE Gallery in Somerset, this week The Wick is taking a closer look at Jan van Huysum I (New Order), a 2014 work that draws Dutch still life into the logic of the digital age. For his New Order series, Cheung works from high-resolution Rijksmuseum photographs of seventeenth-century flower paintings, often featuring tulips, and runs them through an algorithm that rearranges their pixels, rendering the image lush and legible, but only just. Jan van Huysum’s world of abundance begins to fray, turning a genre long associated with beauty, wealth and mortality into a contemporary image of fragility and volatility. In Cheung’s hands, still life becomes a way of thinking about material excess, the fragility of life and the uneasy sense that history, however dressed up in new technologies, keeps circling back on itself. This tension runs through his wider practice. Raised in London by Hong Kong-born parents, Cheung’s work moves between Eastern and Western traditions, art history and digital process, bringing them together in works that question the systems shaping markets, beliefs and memory. The work also offers a compelling way into his exhibition, which brings together 28 works across sculpture, painting, print and etching at CLOSE Gallery from 6 June to 15 August 2026.

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