Artist Shu Lea Cheang to Represent Taiwan at 2019 Venice Biennale
Taipei Fine Arts Museum (TFAM) is delighted to announce Shu Lea Cheang as the sole artist, representing Taiwan at the 58th International Art Exhibition, Venice Biennale 2019. She is the first woman artist to be selected since Taiwan began holding single-artist exhibitions at the Venice Biennale. The nominating committee was composed of a variety of professionals including independent curators, performing arts planners, artists, and art critics, affording broader room for debate and inspiration.
Taipei Fine Arts Museum director Ping Lin remarks: “The Venice Biennale is an international platform. Once every two years, we gather the Taiwanese contemporary art world together to imagine what this platform can be. In recent years Taiwanese artists and art institutions have elevated their participation in the global art community, generating a more refined and complex network of connections. For this reason, the nominating committee employed a greater level of strategic thinking, coloring their artist recommendations with stronger overtones of global strategy. Shu Lea Cheang, a pioneer of net art, not only in Taiwan but around the world, emerged as the first choice.”
Cheang remarks: “Since my net art work BRANDON (1998-1999), a trajectory charged with detours and deviations has teleported me to Palazzo delle Prigioni, Venice, where crimes and punishment are revisited in a 16th century prison setting. My growing up in Taiwan was much associated with a tightly controlled society under Taiwan's martial law (1949-1987). My return to Taiwan after decades of living abroad has exposed me to a liberated, intricate and generous new generation with whom I have only now begun to become acquainted. To be representing Taiwan in its current complex state is a tremendous task, and I am grateful to be accompanied on this venture by the visionary curator Paul B. Preciado and the dedicated VB team at the Taipei Fine Arts Museum.”
Contemporary Net Art Pioneer
Shu Lea Cheang (1954-) grew up in Taiwan and established her own distinctive perspective of art while living in the West, quickly carving out a terrain of her own in the internet world. Considering herself a “digital nomad,” her artistic footprints span Asia, Europe and North America. Her work encompasses such forms as net art installation, feature-length films, and art actions, in which she explores and rethinks the middle ground between technology and humanity in the era of globalization, repeatedly engaging in dialectic on social and political issues such as gender and body politics, ethnic and cultural diversity, history, and the environment.
The works of Shu Lea Cheang have always revolved around the nature of electronic/digital technology, emphasizing collective participation and intervention. In the 1980s Cheang was active in the production of independent videos and grass-roots television programs, as well as documenting the street demonstrations taking place at the time in New York. She also began working in video art, launching her career as an artist. In the 1990s she began to explore net art, creating installations combining computer programs and video interaction that connected virtual networks with real spaces. She also started a series of creative, performance and action projects. Her work BRANDON (1998-1999) was the first web art commissioned and collected by the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum in New York. Since 2000 she has anchored her works in the scenario of a post-netcrash age, developing a science fiction narrative as a countervailing force amidst the chorus of optimism about the future of the internet. Cheang’s work initiates an alternative imagining of the internet beyond its essential function as digital communication technology, transforming it into an artistic medium of collective creation, and inviting viewers to enter its milieu to discuss contemporary social issues. By creating collective experiences that cross cultures and bridge the virtual and real worlds to promote the redistribution of ideas with the aim of achieving genuine social action, she manifests the concept of contemporary art as a form that spans physical boundaries in the digital age.
International Curation
To strengthen the international connections of the exhibition and open up multiple dialogues with the global art community, Taipei Fine Arts Museum and Shu Lea Cheang jointly agreed to invite the Spanish philosopher Paul B. Preciado (1970-) to serve as curator, in light of his apprehension of the creative context and the tacit understanding he has formed with the artist through long-term cooperation. Preciado earned a Ph.D. in Philosophy and Theory of Architecture from Princeton University and studied under Jacques Derrida in New York City. Preciado is today one of the leading thinkers in the fields of gender, sexuality, and body studies, following the steps of Michel Foucault and Judith Butler. He has taught at Université Paris VIII-Saint Denis and at New York University, served as Head of Research at the Museum of Contemporary Art of Barcelona, and was Curator of Public Programs for documenta 14 in 2017. With his solid reputation as academic scholar and curator, Preciado’s visionary projects dovetail with the Shu Lea Cheang’s creative background, lending the upcoming exhibition an interpretive approach able to penetrate the tension of the artworks.
Preciado states: “We are living through a moment of planetary transformation with the advent of artificial intelligence, sophisticated warfare technologies, genetic engineering, and global internet. This is a paradigm shift only comparable to the one that took place with the invention of the printing press and global colonization. The political and poetic potentiality of this moment is as big as the risks of building new forms of oppression and exclusion. We need new grammars and new images in order to forge a new subjectivity, to invent new ways of feeling and desiring. I see Shu Lea Cheang’s work as one of the most powerful creative and experimental tools to navigate this transition. Bringing together many underground traditions, from transfeminism, queer and anti-racist politics, as well as science fiction narrative, video art, and performance, Shu Lea Cheang’s work is a reflection on what it means to be free, to act freely within contemporary society. The historic halls of the Palazzo delle Prigioni Venice, the former prison of the Palazzo Ducale, are an exquisite site to think about the conditions of contemporary subjection, about the constructed limits between normalcy and deviancy, as well as to imagine new emancipatory practices.”
Further information on Shu Lea Cheang can be found at: http://mauvaiscontact.info
58th Venice Biennial Taiwan Pavilion
Exhibition period: May 11, 2019 – November 24, 2019
Venue: Palazzo delle Prigioni, Venice, Italy
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Reflecting upon the transformation of surveillance techniques since the panopticon to include contemporary 3-D facial recognition, AI, and the Internet, Shu Lea Cheang’s 3x3x6 restages the rooms of the Palazzo delle Prigioni—a Venetian prison from the sixteenth century in operation until 1922—as a high-tech surveillance space. Taking as its starting point the story of libertine writer Giacomo Casanova, imprisoned in the Prigioni in 1755, Cheang has conducted in-depth studies on ten historical and contemporary cases of subjects incarcerated because of gender or sexual dissent, including Marquis de Sade and Michel Foucault, as well as contemporary cases from Taiwan and South Africa. Their fictionalized portraits become part of the exhibition’s system; the title of which refers to today’s standardized architecture of industrial imprisonment: a 3 x 3 square-meter cell constantly monitored by 6 cameras.
Cheang departs from the architecture of the panopticon to construct the central space of the exhibition in Room A: the surveillance tower has been inverted to project the portraits of the ten prisoners and connected up to a newly developed 3-D camera surveillance system, which installed at the entrance of the exhibition scans the visitors’ faces—by electing to enter the exhibition they are accepting to become part of the system and to having their face modified. Here, gender and racial morphing become queer digital strategies to disrupt the tradition of colonial and anthropometric identification techniques, extending from Alphonse Bertillon’s criminological photography of the nineteenth century to today’s facial recognition technologies. Connected to the Internet 3x3x6 allows visitors (both physical and virtual) to send selfies and images to the exhibition system. The visitors are thus inside the total surveillance apparatus. Moving into Rooms B and C of the updated Prigioni, the physical visitors then wander into a maze of monitors that unfold the stories of the ten prisoners across time and space, histories and cultures. Whereas in the eighteenth century Casanova’s libertinage and Sade’s atheist negation of morality were the object of surveillance and discipline, in contemporary technopatriarchal digital conditions, the black man constructed as “rapist,” the HIV-positive homosexual, the transgender person, as well as women constructed as sexual e-hunters and witches are the new subjects beyond the law. Finally, in Room D, visitors are invited to discover the control room and the very operating system of the surveillance apparatus in function.
Hacking digital surveillance technologies and social media, Cheang uses the site of the prison to create a real-time dissident interface that the visitor is invited to join. Involving legal documents, fake news, historical reports, myths and fantasies, as well as the data retrieved from 3-D surveillance cameras and the images uploaded by visitors, the exhibition constructs a collective counter-history of sexuality—where trans-punk- science fiction, queer, and anti-colonial imaginations provide visual and critical frameworks to think through the histories of subjection and resistance—and activates a critical proliferation of poetic and political actions for digital times. A contribution to the digital avant-garde, Cheang’s 3x3x6 equally challenges the aesthetics of Internet global capitalism and the gender, sexual, and race norms that hold up its hidden infrastructure.
普里奇歐尼宮（Palazzo delle Prigioni）是威尼斯從十六世紀起一直使用到1922年的監獄。
鄭淑麗的作品《3x3x6》將其打造為一個高科技監控空間，反思從全景監獄（panopticon），到當代3-D人臉辨識、人工智慧、網際網路等監控技術的變遷。鄭淑麗以1755年被囚禁於總督府的浪子作家賈科莫．卡薩諾瓦（Giacomo
Casanova）的故事為出發點，深入研究了十位歷史上及當代因在性別及性傾向上持有異議而遭囚禁之人的案例，包括薩德侯爵和傅柯，以及臺灣及南非的當代個案。這些人的虛構肖像成了展覽體系的一部分。而此次展覽的標題《3x3x6》有意突顯當今監獄體系的標準化建築結構：由六個攝影機監控的3x3平方公尺牢房。
鄭淑麗以全景監獄為靈感來打造A展覽室：監控塔被反轉用來投射十位囚徒的肖像；並透過展覽入口處安裝的最新3-D攝影監控系統，掃描參觀者的臉部——只要選擇參觀展覽，觀眾即接受成為展覽體系的一部分，與自己的臉被改造。在這裡，性別與種族的轉化成為酷兒數位策略，藉以對殖民及人體測量識別的傳統提出質疑——這類技法從十九世紀阿方索．貝蒂雍（Alphonse Bertillon）發明的犯罪攝影到今天的人臉辨識技術，不一而足。《3x3x6》透過網路連結，讓觀眾（包括現場觀眾和網路觀眾）可以把自拍及其他圖像傳送給展覽體系。由此，觀眾被納入了整體監控體系的內部。接下來觀眾進入升級後的普宮B展室和C展室，在這個螢幕迷宮內，講述著十位跨越時空、跨越歷史文化的囚徒生平。在十八世紀，卡薩諾瓦的浮浪和薩德對道德無神論式的否定都是監控和戒律的對象；而在當代數位化技術父權下，被認定為「性侵犯」的黑人、患有愛滋病的同性戀者、跨性別人士，以及所謂的E女巫，則成為新的法外之徒。最後，在D展室，觀眾被邀請進入控制室，探索正在運作中的監控系統。
鄭淑麗以駭客方式入侵數位監控技術和社交媒體，利用監獄場域創造了一個即時的異議界面，並邀請觀眾參與。這個作品採用了法庭文件、偽新聞、歷史報導、神話想像，以及從3-D監控錄像採集的數據，與觀眾上傳的影像，由此集體創作性的「反歷史」——在這部歷史中，跨龐克（trans-punk）科幻、酷兒，以及反殖民想像提供了視覺與批判的框架，讓我們思考征服與抵抗的歷史。同時，這個展覽批判地激發了數位時代的詩意行動及政治行動。作為對數位前衛藝術的貢獻，鄭淑麗的《3x3x6》挑戰了網際網路全球資本主義的美學標準、以及隱藏在其結構中的性別、性及種族規範。