The first institutional survey exhibition of Shu Lea Cheang (b. 1954, Tainan, Taiwan) takes the artist’s first feature film Fresh Kill (1994) as a starting point, presenting the artist and filmmaker’s world-building practices and updating works from the past three decades.
Cheang moved to New York City in the 1980s, where she joined the vibrant scene of independent cinema and started experimenting with video, live TV, and network technologies. Since the 1990s, her work has challenged and furthered our understanding of digital culture. Cheang anticipated the advance of alternative currencies, investigated gamified societies, and probed biotechnologies. Her works often develop over several years through different stages and media, including video, installation, performance, and various forms of cinema.
The exhibition updates works and artefacts into new landscape formations extending through four gallery spaces. Trash appears as a primary theme that leads Cheang’s investigation into the entanglement of biosphere and technosphere. Each gallery is its own world in which internet-based installation, software interaction, and multiplayer performance invite the audience to explore and play.
“KI$$ KI$$” reimagines the exhibition as a transformative journey or a “machine of experience”. From a different angle, but in dialogue with the ongoing exhibition of Philippe Parreno, Shu Lea Cheang’s daring science-fiction narratives focus on non-human intelligences, both natural and artificial. Engaging with new and ancient technologies, the exhibition continues our engagement with contemporary transmedia art practices, following exhibitions by Dumb Type, Tony Cokes, and WangShui.
Curated by Sarah Johanna Theurer with Laila Wu.