Art competitions are unpredictable: there’s no certainty of the best person winning, and the runner-up sometimes reaps the glory. Does anyone now remember Grenville Davey beating Damien Hirst to the Turner Prize in 1992? Or Steve McQueen snatching the 1999 prize from Tracey Emin, while she stole the headlines with her unmade bed?

The latest example is Gordon Cheung, shortlisted for the John Moores 24 painting prize last September by a jury that, as it happens, included Emin. The judges awarded first prize to Martin Greenland, but Cheung’s dramatic entry — an epic 9x15ft fantasy landscape titled Technophobia — was more memorable. It was acquired by the collector James Moores, grandnephew of the prize’s founder, and is now the centrepiece of the 31-year-old artist’s first public exhibition at the Djanogly Gallery, Nottingham.

Since graduating from the Royal College of Art in 2001, Cheung, a British-educated son of Hong Kong Chinese restaurateurs, has made his name with strange, visionary dreamscapes painted on to a backdrop of stock listings from the Financial Times. Over the past two years these economic landscapes of the imagination have made the shortlists of half a dozen art prizes, been included in the British Art Show 6, appeared in group exhibitions from Arizona to Slovenia and secured Cheung a solo show in São Paulo.

Cheung has got where he is, like his parents before him, on his own initiative. His father came to London in the late Sixties to work as a waiter, met and married Gordon’s mother Lin and moved into the couple’s first home, a squat in Brixton. Then the family were housed by the council and did the rounds of the rioting hotspots of South London. In Peckham, Gordon remembers, a brick flew in through a window and hit his mother — a formative experience for a seven-year-old that may explain the urban detritus in his paintings.

Eventually the Cheungs moved up in the world, becoming joint owners of a chip shop in Surbiton, where their son was “bored mindless”. He took refuge in art, “creating worlds under my fictitious control”. His other love was digital technology. He was the first of his friends to own a home computer and was fascinated by the interactive space it opened up.

But his ambition had always been to become a painter, and he asked his art teacher which was the best college. St Martins, he was told, “but you’ll never get in”. He did get in, only to be informed on arrival in October 1994 that painting was dead. Undeterred, he decided to “paint without paint” by using collage. He soon found his own visual language, and his subject. “At that time all the talk was about cyberspace,” he recalls. “There was Utopian euphoria about the perceived idea of a global space. I wanted to reflect that in art.”

His early landscapes were clean-cut modernist collages, using monochrome stock listings “as a metaphor for the virtual world we all exist in”. Since then he has opened himself up to more exotic influences. New works such as Technophobia combine the trademark blocks of collaged FT newsprint with passages of oriental brush painting and sprayed graffiti.

There are also references to art history. The dramatic geography of Cheung’s “techno-sublime” landscapes originates in the New World vistas of the 19th-century Hudson River School. The giant waterfalls in his Colliderscape series may be spewing share prices, but their source lies in the epic views of Niagara painted by Alvan Fisher and Frederic Edwin Church.Some pictures are directly inspired by historic paintings. Breughel’s Highway, with its elevated motorway ending in mid-air, is Cheung’s homage to Breughel’ s famous Landscape with Fall of Icarus, in which peasants attend to mundane tasks while the aspirational Icarus plops unnoticed into the sea.

Today, Cheung says, its moral needs updating. “Perhaps back then you could say daily life just goes on. Now we’re at the dawn of a new millennium, when the condition of the world has become much more urgent. In a way we can no longer ignore these sorts of fables.”

The Big Bang generation of Young British Artists assumed a superior position of ironic detachment; Cheung belongs to the generation that fell to Earth.

Two years ago financial pressures nearly forced him to give up painting. “I hit rock bottom, and when I clawed my way out I resolved to paint like every day was my last day.”

Gordon Cheung Recent Paintings is at Djanogly Gallery, Nottingham, from Saturday until February 25.

www.gordoncheung.com