My work has dealt largely with collective memory and perceived mythology through the visual representation of places, and conscious and unconscious states.  Questions of freedom, daily anxieties, and the impermanence of life are tackled as a framework from which to create a wide range of ephemeral images and works, whether through gestural painting and drawing, found objects or other mediums. I often attempt to encapsulate the world through the lens of a migratory and transitory viewpoint. The indeterminacy, tactility and quietude of the work can be seen as a resistance against the fast consumption of images. Through a variety of works which relate to one another and our surroundings, the work reveals the fluidity of identity. 

-Christine Cheung

Christine Cheung’s works gives the spectator a sense of an “aftermath”. The artworks appear to be the remains, fragments, or traces of something that just occurred. Cheung’s approach to painting does not only involve paint and a canvas, but turns painting into an event, with references to art history; action painting, abstract expressionism, and Fluxus. Her paintings are often derived from a performance, or she paints using a particular object which leaves different traces. With the workshop Invisible Drawings: Grey Area she invites the public to paint on asphalt with water. She also strives to broaden the concept of traces in collaboration with fellow artists; for example in the current international exhibition DRY TIDE, which is based on the returning tide as a metaphor. The paradox of oblivion is an important aspect of Cheung’s works. It is not possible to forget without also being able to remember. Fragments and traces tie together and make up a story, just as the objects make connections between different places and events. In oblivion there is renewal. The scattered fragments of memory are put together into a story, or into an imagined space. 

-Excerpt from a text by Petra Schlömer, Museum Educator, Trondheim kunstmuseum.

Christine Cheung’s large-scale acrylic paintings are her latest works in a series entitled “Swipe.” Reminiscent of abstract expressionism, Cheung’s watery, semi-transparent strokes and subsequent trickles seem as if they were left behind by a performance about communication. Even the titles of her paintings, “Swing” or “Swipe,” refer to movements rather than content.  Hosting a buildup of additions and effacements, white space is filled with messages that may be illegible. Roland Barthes writes that a Cy Twomby painting “retains the gesture, not the product” of writing. For Twombly and Cheung, we wonder whether it was a struggle, a meditation, or a transgression, that made these marks. Cheung’s work dally between the ephemeral and the permanent, the controlled and the automatic. - Linda Green, excerpt from Ex Girlfriend’s in the Age of Drones, catalogue.

In the first canvas, a river of purples and reds cuts a swath through what looks like a jungle scene, where a red-cloaked figure wades into, or passes through, the waters. Another exists along the shoreline. Next, a muted Naples Yellow and grey landscape with sketched-in fields, is inhabited by even more nondescript characters. The third, a more abstracted painting, with vivid colours, drips orange and teal swatches. The larger-scale painting, The Circle Game (2008), with its brightly coloured purple, recalls Peter Doig’s basketball court, but here, white-scarved figures huddle in the centre of the court, locking arms. Other ghost-like forms make their way into the scene, as other figures in these paintings appear to drift between the place they inhabit and the media that refuses to develop them...Cheung’s paintings Jakarta Gendlea (I Have Never Been to Japan) (2008) and The Circle Game (2008), each painted while the artist was in residence in Indonesia, contemplate the historical and political regimes of place, existing in constant limbo, and ultimately determined through identity and subjective views. 

-Travis Murphy, excerpt from Time and Place in this Space, FFWD Calgary

She is renewing the language of abstract expressionism. With her strong use of imagery and colour she has the potential to engage an international audience. 

-Adjudicators from Lieutenant Governor of Alberta Emerging Artist Awards