Location: Oakland, CA
Medium: Painting, printmaking, drawing, mural, skateboard graphics
Website: hashimotocontemporary.com/artists/44-jeffrey-cheung
Jeffrey Cheung was born and raised in the San Francisco Bay Area and lives and works in Oakland. He received his BA from the University of California, Santa Cruz. He is represented by Hashimoto Contemporary, with spaces in San Francisco, New York, and Los Angeles. He is the co-founder of Unity Press, Unity Skateboarding, and THERE Skateboards — a queer skate collective, independent press, and skateboard company he founded in 2017 that has become one of the most visible platforms for queer visibility in skate culture globally. Since 2017 he has hand-painted more than a thousand custom skateboard decks given freely to young skaters at meetups, each one depicting his signature androgynous figures.
His work was included in Bay Area Now 9 at Yerba Buena Center for the Arts (2023–24), where his installation Ceasefire Now! — dedicated to queer and trans Palestinians — was a centerpiece of the triennial. He has exhibited at Jeffrey Deitch Projects in Los Angeles, V1 Gallery in Copenhagen, City Bird Gallery in Paris, and Bedford Stuyvesant Artist Residency in Brooklyn. He also plays music in the Bay Area punk bands Meat Market and Unity.
Cheung works in painting, printmaking, drawing, and mural, using a vivid, graphic style to celebrate queer identity, community, and bodily freedom. His signature figures are boldly colored, androgynous, and nude — bodies that twist and intertwine with each other, that take up space without apology, that are simultaneously playful and politically purposeful. His practice is inseparable from community: the zine-making, skateboard-giving, and collective-building that underpins Unity are as much a part of his art as the large-scale canvases. Cheung embraced printmaking as a vehicle to explore his sexuality, and the zine format — cheap, reproducible, immediate — remains central to his approach. His figurative paintings on canvas have evolved from intimate zine-scale drawings into expansive, joyful celebrations of queer life that refuse the boundaries of gallery convention.
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