Escape Velocity at The Fred Schnider Gallery of Art (Jun 14-Aug 14, 2019)
Memory, the unconscious, and spatial experience of our shared concrete and cultural environments all contribute to the evolution of Chee-Keong Kung’s work. Kung believes images can trigger reverberations at different depths within our psyche, recalling memories from years ago or fresh episodes from a week ago. Recurring motifs such as cloud shapes can suggest wafting smoke as well as uncontainable astronomical events. Respectively, they conjure in Kung’s mind Taoist burnt offerings and torrential tropical storms from his upbringing in Singapore. Impressions from the media milieu—magazine ads, news photos, comic books, other artists’ works etc. — are transmuted into specific color combinations and geometric relationships on the canvas.
