Shu Lea Cheang

What the Heck: Shu Lea Cheang on Hacking Tactics, Virus Becoming, and Geek Farming

02 May 2024 — 02 May 2024

Guggenheim, New York

To celebrate the 2024 LG Guggenheim Award, recipient and pioneering Net artist Shu Lea Cheang will explore her groundbreaking artistic journey in conversation with Noam Segal, LG Electronics Associate Curator. The performance-lecture will focus on her innovative hacking tactics and virus becomings that have adapted to evolving technologies. She will also address the concept of “geek farming” in relation to CycleX, the geek farm collective she initiated located in upstate New York that intersects of technology and farming. Drawing inspiration from her deep-rooted passions for science fiction, queer aesthetics, and community building, Cheang will delve into themes of biotechnology, networked societies, and multiple forms of harvesting.

Shu Lea Cheang

Shu Lea Cheang (born in Taiwan, 1954) is an artist and networker working at the interface between video, net-based installation, software interaction and durational performance. For over four decades, her practice explores subjects that are in a state of constant flux, including racial relations, the ecological impact of humans, information dissemination, the ethics of biotechnology and sexual politics.

Her first landmark exhibition, Color Schemes, was held in 1990 at the Whitney Museum of American Art, New York. The Guggenheim web-based commission, Brandon, 1998-1999, is the first work of this medium commissioned by a major institution and is continually cited in new media art history as a seminal work of net art. Brandon is a probing investigation of human sexuality and identity through the life and death of Brandon Teena, a young transgender man, who was raped and murdered in Nebraska for being transgender. She has had foresight into alternative currencies and decentralised organisations with Garlic=Rich Air (2002–), investigated gamified societies with Bowling Alley (1995), probed biotechnologies in Locker Baby Project (2001–2012) and explored their mutable nature in Mycelium Network Society (2017–).

Cheang represented Taiwan at the 58th Venice Biennale, presenting 3x3x6, 2019, a panoptic installation dealing with architectural control, confinement technologies and data collection via ‘case studies’ of people imprisoned because of their gender, sexual or racial nonconformity.

In 2024, Project Native Informant presented Scifi New Queer Cinema, 1994-2023, a solo exhibition of Cheang’s four major film works: FRESH KILL, 1994, I.K.U., 2000, FLUIDØ, 2017, and UKI, 2023. Each work dismisses disciplinary limitations, conventional separations of form and content, aesthetics and truth. Her genre bending gender hacking practices challenge existing operating mechanisms and society’s structural boundaries.

Cheang’s works have been exhibited internationally, including; MUSEION, Bolzano; Museum Brandhorst, Munich; Hammer Museum, Los Angeles; Palais de Tokyo, Paris; Walker Art Center, Minneapolis; NTT Inter Communication Center, Tokyo and The Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, New York. She has been a member of the alternative media collective Paper Tiger Television since 1982 and produced public-access programs for the group addressing racism in the media.

She was recently awarded the 2024 LG Guggenheim Award in recognition of her prescient exploration of emerging technologies and their broader societal implications.

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