Shu Lea Cheang is one of Taiwan’s important multimedia artists. Since the 1990s, she has challenged established relationships among the body, sexuality, technology, and power through Internet art, videos, and films. From the sex-positive feminist and queer perspectives, she transforms desires once considered taboo or marginal into profound questions about contemporary social structures. Today, in the context of highly pervasive technology, as we revisit Cheang’s works, we are compelled to consider how much autonomy of the body remains. Discussions will focus on Cheang’s four screened feature-length films: Fresh Kill (1994), I.K.U. (2000), UKI (2023), and Fluidø (2017).
Moderator ｜Sing Song-Yong
Sing Song-Yong is a professor and dean of the Graduate Institute of Trans-disciplinary Arts at Taipei National University of the Arts. He has recently curated several exhibitions such as Footprints of the Walker: Tsai Ming-Liang; The Dawn of Taiwanese Video Art in the 1980s-1990s; and A One and a Two: Edward Yang Retrospective. He is also the author of Projecting: Tsai Ming-Liang Towards Transart Cinema and Taiwanese Cineplasticity: Six Cross-Disciplinary Moving-Image Arts in Search of Cinema, as well as the editor of Thinking with Tsai Ming-Liang: 13 Faces of Contemporary Chinese Cinema Studies and The Future of Time: Memos for 40 Years of Taiwan New Cinema.
Panelist｜Shu Lea Cheang
Incorporating diverse creative media, including film, video, installation art, and cyberspace, Shu Lea Cheang explores ethnic stereotypes, sexual politics, popular media, institutional power, and humanity in the digital and information age.
BRANDON (1988-99) became the first Internet artwork commissioned and collected by the Guggenheim Museum in New York. In 2019, she represented Taiwan at the 58th Venice Biennale with a mixed media installation entitled 3x3x6.
In 2020, she received a Guggenheim Fellowship to produce the cyberpunk science fiction film UKI, which premiered at Filmfest München in late June 2023, followed by an international tour. In 2024, she was honored with the LG Guggenheim Award, in recognition of her groundbreaking insight into emerging technologies and their broader social impacts. In 2020, she initiated the LAB KILL LAB project, which launched Hagay Dreaming. She then directed its theatrical version.
