Decades in the Making: Interview with Shu Lea Cheang

I know that your identity is diffused, global and digital, but what was it like growing up in Taiwan, and what made you decide to come to the United States? Does being Asian mean anything to you, politically or culturally?

I have always wanted to study cinema and make films, but in Taiwan I had limited access to educational resources that would allow me to do so. I went to New York University and was very purposeful about my studies. Whenever you come from a monocultural country like Taiwan to America, you suddenly realize you are a minority. Of course, now Asians have much more power, but back then you were often boxed into stereotypes. For me, being young, Asian and female was a poignant identity but people wanted to exoticize and orientalize you. That prompted me to make the video installation Those Fluttering Objects of Desire (1992–93), which was shown at the Whitney Biennial in 1993. The work tells the story of 25 women and their experiences of postcolonial interracial desire through television monitors and red phones—visitors had to pay, as one would in a porn booth, to watch the short video. 

Throughout the 1980s, you were involved with media activism, and became a part of the collective Paper Tiger Television, who had an interventionary approach, as well as New York’s downtown performance scene. Can you talk about your activities, and how that may have shaped your practice?

After I graduated from NYU, I trained myself to edit films and videos for a living. In the ’80s, there were a lot of activist demonstrations on the streets protesting racism, the AIDS epidemic and labor conditions. Paper Tiger Television was committed to covering these demonstrations and debunking the ideological indoctrination of mainstream media. They had a public access channel on which they broadcast live, weekly shows. I was subsequently introduced to the collective through a friend. We often met in a café and planned things out. Since this is all pre-internet and people had limited channels to express their ideas, what we were doing was a big deal—everybody was encouraged to be a producer and editor. 

The downtown performance scene was quite active; we also did a lot of clubbing at the Pyramid in East Village. I was involved myself, but I wasn’t much of a good performer. Instead, I tried to gather figures from this milieu in my works. For example, playwright and performance artist Jessica Hagedorn became my scriptwriter for Fresh Kill (1994). For my installation Color Schemes (1989), I recorded 12 performers from different backgrounds talking about racial discrimination in the entertainment industry, and placed monitors displaying these videos inside washing machines. The idea was to use “white wash” and “color wash” as metaphors to talk about racism and assimilation. 

Most of your works prior to the ’90s dealt with media like television broadcasting. Fresh Kill was the first film that took up the intermingling of digital media and cyberspace through its plot where the characters rise up against the GX corporation through public access television and computer hacking. Following that was a series of works that dealt with the intersection of virtual and physical spaces. What’s interesting is that whereas the early web was largely text-based, the introduction of Netscape in 1994 brought about an explosion of images and representational practices that hadn’t existed before. What was your experience with the internet then? 

By the end of the ’80s, I was already on the net, but mostly on BBS (Bulletin Board System). It was only after the premier of Fresh Kill in 1994 that I was formally introduced to the internet. In a way, Fresh Kill embodied my activism around the racial issues of the late-’80s. It took a resistant stance against the colonization of bodies and the larger environment. By the time I did Bowling Alley at the Walker Art Center in 1995, I could apply all the programming language I learnt at a previous residency in Tokyo. I also came up with the term “high-tech aborigine,” which implied that even though I wanted to have access to the technology and bandwidth, I didn’t really own it. 

Cyberfeminists were actively questioning the meaning of “cybernetics” itself, which has its roots in the Greek word kubernētēs, meaning steersmen, and its connections to the act of governing and control. Your self-identifications as a “cyber-homesteader,” or “high-tech aborigine” seem to imply a critique of the colonization and homogenization of cyberspace. Do you see yourself as affiliated with cyberfeminism?

Yes, I’m quite influenced by VNS Matrix and their Cyberfeminist Manifesto. We are good friends still. It’s all about how we identify with technology and intervene in the daddy-mainframe, which was understood to be a male-dominated, military-industrial data environment. While making Bowling Alley, as the Walker Art Center didn’t have internet access then, we got AT&T to install ISDN there and across town in a bowling alley to make an inter-space connection, and so we could access the web. It got me thinking—who gets access and who doesn’t? 

Why is it important for some of these works to have a physical location of display, rather than be solely on the web? 

Again, this comes back to the negotiation of access and how to reach out to the public. Buy One Get One (1997), which was commissioned by Japan’s NTT InterCommunication Center (ICC), is an interesting example. The concept is to use the commercial underpinning of “buy one get one free” to grant internet access to areas deprived of it. In the ’90s, everybody was busy making their “homepage” and decorating it with repeating images called “wallpaper.” I travelled with writer Lawrence Chua, carrying a custom-made digital suitcase shaped like a bento box to 15 countries in Asia and Africa. We made “homeless webpages” for people who had no access to the web, and uploaded them to the ICC gallery. But internet access wasn’t readily available everywhere. In India, we couldn’t find internet until we got to Hilton Hotel. That seamlessness between physical space and cyberspace was a fantasy back then—you didn’t simply just jump on. Therefore, we had to be very attentive in making physical interfaces to meaningfully interact with the public. 

The first internet-based art to be commissioned by the Guggenheim Museum, the Brandon (1998–99) project, is super ambitious. It uses a number of web interfaces, physical installations, and public events to explore the tragic life of transgender teen, Brandon Teena, who was raped and murdered in 1993 as a result of a hate crime. For me, the interactive hyperlinks and pop-up windows really highlighted the discursive constructs of sex, gender and sexuality. Can you talk about the process of developing it and collaborating with other artists and institutions?

Brandon was designed to have multiple different interfaces, including the “bigdoll,” “roadtrip,” “mooplay,” and “panopticon” interface. I thought a lot about how the transgender body, using prosthetic extensions and surgical modifications, mirrored Donna Haraway’s cyborg myth and the human-machine interface. I conducted a lot of the initial research myself. For example, I had to figure out how to get through to transgender communities in Amsterdam and San Francisco. I also went to Nebraska to study the court-case of Brandon Teena. In 1998, I checked myself into the Society of Old and New Media (now Waag Society) in Amsterdam, where I got to work with a team of programmers and designers. I realized that collaboration is the only way the work could be developed. It was also important for institutions to be involved—they could provide funding, resources and the public I needed. In addition to doing an installation at the Theatrum Anatonicum that was net-linked to the Guggenheim, I was invited by the Civic Institute at Harvard University law school to stage a court drama and talk about virtual crimes.

You initially wanted writer Samuel Delany to script I.K.U. and both I.K.U. and FLUIDØ are dedicated to him. What was your relationship with him? 

Delany is first and foremost a science-fiction writer. At the same time, he is so vulnerable and naked in terms of his homosexuality. Two of his books, The Mad Man (1994) and Hogg (1995), really push the extremes of representing insatiable desire and lust. He described the abandonment of pissing in such an incredible way. From the ’80s onwards, AIDS really changed our collective sexual perception, as it generated a lot of fear over the exchange of fluids between bodies. Yet Delany’s books are all about that extreme indulgence and absolute abandonment. Unfortunately, the timing didn’t work out for us to collaborate on scriptwriting. By then, Tokyo had already seduced me to do a spinoff of Blade Runner’s futurescape.

You mentioned that the idea for FLUIDØ came shortly after I.K.U., and that it took 17 years to actually produce it. Can you talk about the context of AIDS and the personal incentives that kept you going? And how do FLUIDØ’s central themes overlap with or depart from I.K.U.? 

While showing I.K.U. in Copenhagen, I was introduced to Lars von Trier, whose Zentropa studio had a division called Puzzy Power, which was dedicated to producing “erotic” films for women. They were very interested in my concept for FLUIDØ. The work recalls the AIDS epidemic in the ’80s when I lost many friends who were part of New York’s art and performance communities, and in it, I ultimately claim the virus as my own salvation. Unfortunately, the company went bankrupt within a year. I thought the film would never work out and started using this concept to do installations, web pieces, and performances instead. I was censored in three cities—Kristiansand, Berlin and Montreal—for organizing improvised casting calls. Finally in 2012, I connected with the German producer Jürgen Brüning. It took us three years to obtain funding. 

Despite having a loose plot, I.K.U. is structured like pornography, where each scene is organized around the act of having sex. In contrast, FLUIDØ had a much stronger political initiative. It fast tracks to the year 2060, where mutated AIDS viruses have given birth to Zero-Gen, human carriers of a new bio-drug that creates an intoxicating high. A new war on drugs begins and the government dispatches drug-resistant replicants for arrest missions. I wanted to weave in my complex about corporations, the government and their co-optation of the body, and the Zero-Gen fighting back. To me, the extreme portrayal of bodily fluids and ejaculation was very necessary—it’s both forcibly extracted as commodity and a way to reclaim physical sex and pleasure. 

Do you think a rupture happened in the 21st century, because that somehow coincides with your move into “viral love and biohacking” and becoming “post-net”? We are all now familiar with the idea of biopower, where our bodies are subject to control and surveillance, while technological processes and data are becoming dematerialized and hard to detect.

Since the 2000s, I have been making a series of installations called the Locker Baby Project. This work was the first time that I delved into aspects of biotechnology and human cloning that were secretly being developed in labs. At the same time, the DIY open-source movement prompted many biohack labs to sprout up. At the moment, I am developing UKI, an interruptive work of cinema. Billed as the sequel to I.K.U. and set in a post-net e-trashville, the premise is that the GENOM Corp., the fictional company from I.K.U. that sends out shapeshifting replicants to collect, transmit and upload “orgasmic data,” has now occupied human bodies to establish BioNet, where red blood cells are reprogrammed into computing units to reprocess human orgasmic experiences. 

When is UKI scheduled to come out?

Oh, dear, it would possibly take me another 10 years! But I will be showing a short clip of it as an installation at the 2018 Gwangju Biennial. 

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