Press Release - Fall into a Flower by Jeffrey Cheung
Jeffrey Cheung - Tulips
Oil and acrylic on canvas. 59 × 71 inches. 2026.
Fall into a Flower
a solo exhibition by
Jeffrey Cheung
Opening Saturday, November 7th at 6pm
pt.2
1523b Webster St.
Oakland, CA 94612
pt.2 Gallery is pleased to present Fall into a Flower, a solo exhibition by Jeffrey Cheung exploring intimacy, connection, and the spaces where we feel free. In these new works, intertwined bodies become enmeshed within flowers, leaves, and surrounding landscapes. Other paintings turn toward domestic life, settling into quiet moments of care, affection, and rest in the bedroom or at the kitchen table. Both the home and the natural world are transformed into sites of closeness, comfort, and escape.
Jeffrey Cheung - Underwear
Oil on canvas. 48 × 60 inches. 2026.
This is the first exhibition featuring Cheung’s work in oil, introducing a new medium to their practice. Alongside this shift in material, scale alters these painted environments completely. Small figures gather beneath oversized flowers, disappear into foliage, overlap, or blur into the landscapes around them. At times, bodies seem to merge with both nature and one another. This sense of smallness isn't simply about hiding, but about finding tenderness, safety, and love within a world of one's own. Flowers, despite their fleeting nature, recur as symbols of love, beauty, growth, peace, and sanctuary, all made more precious by an increasingly unstable climate and sociopolitical landscape.
To fall into a flower becomes another kind of falling in love — an entry into a smaller world of one's own.
Some pieces draw from the history and spaces of queer cruising, where hidden trails, parks, bathrooms, and other concealed places have become sites for intimacy, encounter, and connection. This includes depictions from local gardens, cruising spots, friends' apartments, and the artist's own home. Cheung filters these specific locations through memory and experience, allowing familiar surroundings to move between the observed and the imagined.
The concealment found in outdoor landscapes carries directly into the domestic spaces of the exhibition. Curtains, veils, shower doors, and dense foliage blur the boundary between public and private life, separating without fully closing the world out. Behind them, figures sleep, bathe, tend to themselves, and lie beside partners. Privacy may be fragile, but even these thin boundaries make room for vulnerability and freedom.
Jeffrey Cheung - Tea Pot
Ink and acrylic on paper. 14.5 x 11.5 inches framed. 2026.
Alongside these recognizable environments are intuitive paintings in which bodies float within fields of color, untethered from a specific place. Cheung approaches these works without preliminary sketches, treating the compositions as puzzles in which one brushstroke determines the next. Figures emerge, overlap, transform, and sometimes disappear as layers of paint accumulate, allowing accident and chance to shape the work. Instead of mapping out a specific setting, these paintings hold onto pure energy, desire, humor, and joy.
The worlds that emerge across Fall into a Flower are playful, tender, and dreamlike. Blending real places with memory and imagination, they offer rare sanctuaries to hide, to rest, to love, and to find one another.
Jeffrey Cheung (b.1989) is a Bay Area artist whose bright figurative work explores human connections through joyous figures and vividly colored nudes that twist, embrace, and playfully interact. His work combines exaggerated forms, layered textures, and dynamic bodies, creating a sense of movement and vitality that draws the viewer into intimate, imaginative scenes. By blending humor, sensuality, and a tactile approach to materials, Cheung transforms everyday gestures and social encounters into visual narratives that examine freedom, identity, and community.
Cheung has shown throughout the Bay Area including SFMOMA and Yerba Buena Center of the Arts; as well as Jack Hanley Gallery (New York); Jeffrey Deitch Projects (Los Angeles); and V1 Gallery (Copenhagen); and has work included in collections at the Smithsonian American Art Museum. He is also the founder of Unity Press & Skateboarding and There Skateboards.