Aries Cheung

Toronto Visual Artist

2003

Twins � Series of 4
12" x 9"
Watercolour on paper
2003

Twins is a separate series of drawings that examine genetic manipulation on human lives. While we ask who � human or God, culture or nature � should control group selection, my drawings meditate on our role as human in the eco-system. I have created hybrids between human and animals, whose images border on the beautiful and the grotesque, on the healthy and the diseased, on reality and fantasy, on scientific speculations and fairy tales.

Four Seasons � Series of 12
12" x 9"
Watercolour on paper
2003

The Four Season Series is a playful attempt in depicting the psychological journey of childhood. The seasonal changes being the backdrop for the metamorphosis, the various kinds of human/animals hybrids present a curiously intimate connection between civilization and nature. The drawings are in the childish, or whimsical style of fairy tales but the seemingly tranquil sentiments throughout the transformations are violating, instrusive, adsurd and ereely violent.

The Littel Boy � Series of 4
12" x 9"
Watercolour on paper
2003

The Little Boy is a series of drawings that deal with the aftermath of human-made catastrophes. Children being the main subject matter, The Little Boy presents the long-lasting, devastating effect of wars on the vulnerable. Children are a symbol of hope and future. Victimizing children in a large scale is indicative of ignorance and global destruction. The line-figures of children are inspirations from photographs of young victims of the Hiroshima and Nagasaki atomic attacks. Instead of direct or graphic representations of the devastated conditions, the drawings make use of schematic signs and symbols to express the horror of massive destructions. The traumatized expressions of the ghost-like figures seem to be frozen in time, permanently trapped in a state of shock, horror and disbelief. Alongside the children images are flying planes, bombs, deformed fetuses and infected body parts. There is also the text, The Little Boy, the name of the first atomic bomb that fell on Japan. This carries the irony of naming a weapon that would kill the innocent and the vulnerable. The drawings are done on Asian tissue paper, pre-printed on which are red grids to help children practice calligraphy.

Temptation
33" x 55"
Ink on Myla, acrylic on canvas, inkjet prints, 2002

Why did God create Adam and Eva but forbid them to have sex? What are their roles as sexual beings? If they are not made sexual, how significant is it to present them as two separate sexes? Are sexes social construct? How are desires determined by sex roles and sexual identities?

In Temptation, I use my self image to re-create the temptation scene of Eve and Adam. By re-interpreting a biblical story, Temptation explores human sexualities and the remifications of its expressions. There are the ambiguous visual play of sexes in the picture. Both the female and male are my own body, the female presented by tugging or hidding my genital behind my legs. I kept the upper body as my "orginal" male body to subvert the conventional notion of bi-polar sexes. The sexual identities here are absurdly ambiguous. Ambiguity is the starting point of my investigation of the inherent bi-sexual nature of human beings.

Here Eve is in a full frontal pose: confident, assertive and positively sexual. She carries a fire in her belly. The fire, as warm and comforting as it is intense and powerful, is a symbol of fertility and desire. It is the orgin of life. Opposite is the white thin-lined cross overlaying the groin area of Adam. It is the symbol of crucifixion and death. It contains the male sexual organ, confining its expression and its activities. It is the condemnation of desire.

Both photographs of Eve and Adam are staged portraits, realistic, flat, frontal and static, resembling scientific photo-illustrations. Overlayed on top is a a Myla sheet, the translucency of which subdues and blurrs the figures, further mystifying their mythical quality. The layering also directs our focus first onto the hand-drawn signs and then their relationship to the bodies. The diagrammatic, design-like composition attempts to compare the similar authoritative overtone of science and that of biblical narration.

Floating between the two standing figures is the serpent. The serpent's face is a portrait of myself as a baby taken from a childhood photograph. The serpent's body, painted with expressive, sweepy brush strokes, looks like a ghostly or celestial being. The baby's ambivilent, emotionless expression presents the serpent as anything but evil. It might as well be the child of Eve and Adam. It is primordial. It could also be a fetus, a sperm, a human-beast or human-celestial hybrid, a holy child born with a sinister twist. Does "evil" exist out there somewhere, or does it reside in our body ever since the creation of human kind?

Self Portrait as a Child � Series of 4
12" x 9"
Ink on Myla, paper
2002

The Self Portrait as a Child series are my retrospective examination of my pyschic in my own childhood. In each drawing, I put ink washes on a translucent Myla sheet and overlay the sheet on a portrait of myself as a child. The ink washes are "automatic", the design of which is without pre-conceived ideas or calculations. They are random and spontaneous markings, which express my emotions in an intuitive way. The translucent quality of the Myla allows interaction bewteen the markings and the photo image. The overlapping effect emphazises the act of laying-upon, the veiling of my childhood history with my adult emotions.

The markings on the face look like dirt, tatoos, or skin disease. Some makings are more recognizable in form � such as a cross, a drop of tear or blood, or skin rashes. Some are mere abstract, ambiguous shapes. The shapes, colours, and positions of the markings are creative (artistic) responses to the features on the face. They are manifestations � or signs � of energy, tensions, emotions and the interactions of them, which all happen underneath the face.

These self portraits also serve for myself as a reference point for children's psychic as well as adult's intervention on children's learning of the world.

Today's Child in Red takes child exploitation as a symbolic term to express my emotions growing up in an environment that was politically oppressive and sexually repressive. The figure in this painting is a Third World child worker, seriously injured in a chemical explosion in a factory. The child is bound by medical devices, which on one hand provide cure and protection, but on the other hand become bondage and intrusion. He is deprived of freedom in return for, ironically, survival and growth.

Mapping the child's body are Chinese characters representing the hours of a day. They are also the fortune-telling calculus numerals in I Ching. They predict and dictate the fate of a person by her/his birth hour. The child's braids refer to the Ching dynasty China, when China was battling with several European countries, which resulted in some cities becoming European colonies. I was born and growing up in Hong Kong, but I immigrated to Canada before Hong Kong was returned by Britain to China. This has created for me an intricate "trinity" of self-identities: Hong Kong-Chinese-Canadian.

Today's Child is the title of a local newspaper column introducing children for adoption. These children are mostly people of colour, who are most often developmentally or physically challenged.

Today's Child in Yellow explores, through child poverty and famine, the socio-economic dynamic between colonizers and the colonized. The dying African child, who has a halo in the form of a slave collar, rises like a Christian angelic figure from a floral pattern. On the floral branches are portraits of children growing out like fruit. These portraits are children "advertised" on adoption websites. Superimposed on the branches is a Chinese astrological diagram. I intend to make a connection between the fatalism of my cultural traditions and the economic immobility of disenfranchised populations.

2002

1999

Mask

October 14-30, 2000
Hart House, Ardor Room, University of Toronto

Mask is a series of mix-media relief sculpture in the form of masks. On each mask are collage images of cultural references, and references pointing to contemporary issues. The masks represent my conscious conception of?the Chinese people and the unconscious self-perception as a Chinese person.

As an immigrant, I see the connection between the process of masking and the process of my own "naturalization" to become part of the so called "mainstream" society. Personally, "simulating" into the "mainstream" while "hanging onto" the "ethnocultural" traditions has been a conflict. This conflict urges my identity to shift back and forth between expectations.

My masks are layers of identities and fragments of personal cultural history. These layers and fragments are constant variables, a term as paradoxical in itself as what it is symbolically pointing to. While my cultural consciousness and my identities continued to interact, I was trapped between these layers and fragments, feeling uncertain about my cultural identity.

Each mask is an assembly of found images and objects. They are amalgamation of Chinatown esthetics, Chinese classical arts, personal, historical and political references. There are face-reading diagrams, folksy animal heads, opera painted faces, crafts, domestic objects, Chairman Mao's red star cap, Queen Elizabeth's money note portrait and so on.

Instead of cover, my masks uncover. These masks represent self identities I may assume. I believe that putting on a mask helps one explore a "truer" identity. It is a dream taking over reality, a revelation of the real self. As Carl G. Jung suggests that "modern rational man has tried to cut himself off from such psychic associations (from wearing a mask), which nevertheless survive in the unconscious".

Ironically, it is sometimes the "less civilized" or "less developed" cultures that are more willing to reach for their "psychic identity", more ready for "mystical participation". The readiness of wearing masks in traditional Asian rituals and performing arts hence facilitate my mask making process.

The result is a series of structured chaos or chaotic structures. The "facial features" on each masks are so incongruent that they seem violently deformed.Each face is that of a mutant who constantly undergoes transformations in his/her search for self-identity.

1997

1998

The event has caused another visual sensation in the city of Toronto. My recent work was shown at one of the exhibitions begining May 1, 1998.

Teaching

My Education

My exhibitions in the past