Fourth Dimension

West Installation View

There is conflicting information about the infamous incident at Tienanmen Square on June 4th, 1989. In any case, it was an unfortunate event. Hopefully history will clarify some of the facts in the future. Part of an ongoing art project initiated in 1980 entitled ABSS 1980- .

East Installation View

Performance scenes. During the performance, audience were being asked to remain on the western part of the gallery behind a taped division. The 'target skid' became a finished art piece only after arrows were being shot on the target. The show became completely installed after the video tape recorded during the performance with the cam-corder aimed at the audiences from below the target, was being played in the VCR. The audiences had become performers and assistants in completing the 'Performance Installation' art piece.

Cheung's upcoming exhibition at the Red Head Gallery is part of an on-going project. For Fourth Dimension Cheung re-examines media coverage of the 1989 students protests in China's Tienanmen Square. He looks at early reports media in the daily papers, which clam high death tolls and consider the Chinese government's intervention a "massacre". While also reviewing articles and television reports that bring the death tool down from tens of thousands to three hundred, roughly half civilians and half soldiers. The latter reports depicts the rioters as violent instigators who firebombed tanks and buses full of soldiers. These soldiers are described not as hardened fascist, but instead as young peasants recently recruited from the Chinese countryside. By symbolically setting up opposing perspectives, Cheung does not simply ask what happened in 1989, but brings these modes of representation into question.

Like his earlier work, Cheung depends on audiences as integral performers in a continual re-interruption of this historical event. He does not simply ask them to choose a side, but through loosely controlled movement and shifting imagery he ask them to question their assumption about what is actual and what is fictitious. Their search is not for a truth, but for shifting truths. For Cheung histories parallel futures.

"There have been numerous theories, scientifically, philosophically and spiritually, on the Fourth Dimension. My uneducated speculations see this 'gray area' existing as an in-between, both dividing and bringing together true and false, wrong and right, good and bad, happiness and sorrow. It is all about harmonious contradiction. Contradictions that bring together and separate diverse and fluctuating meanings."

Target with crumpled rice paper with calligraphy in wash & ink from a poem by Emperor Shui-Tsi of the Ming Dynasty. The poem is about the Emperor's desire to give up his throne to become a monk (a subtle example of the 4th Dimension). When the calligraphy was on a sheet of rice paper it was in a 2-d form. It was in a 3-d form when it was in a ball shape, and the arrow represents the 4th vector of the 4th dimension. Shooting the arrows was also a mean to use the 'air space' of the gallery space.

Audience performance (audiences were manipulated by the display of the art works on the wall into performing different gestures; particularly bowing or kneeling toward the Tienanmen Square poster hung on south wall).