Shu Lea Cheang

Shareen and Claire, a lesbian couple living on Staten Island, find themselves ensnared in a vast conspiracy involving a ghost ship of nuclear refuse, ominous television commercials, and deadly cat food.

It is the year 2060 and AIDS has been eradicated. However, in some, the HIV virus has now mutated into a gene from which a drug can be produced that has become the white powder of the twenty-first century. With a virtually supported scanning system, secret police are trying to identify anyone who carries this gene. Filmed in Berlin, Taiwan-born multimedia artist and filmmaker Shu Lea Cheang’s science fiction dystopia revolves around a struggle to gain control over the production and exploitation of bodily fluids. Her film is like an orgiastic opera; a breathless round of bodies, secretions, performances and sexual acts often performed in the service of an overriding economy. An unusual, largely experimental and deliberately parapornographic drama in which the borders between the sexes as well as homo-, hetero-, bi-, trans- or intersexual are constantly blurred.

"Welcome to the Fisting Club, The first rule of the Fisting Club is : Never talk about the Fisting Club."

Paris, like the other metropolitan cities in Europe, was flourishing because of new crossing urbanities, while tension was born between the conservative and the new types of Europeans. By the year of 2030, the new races of Europeans have a chance to return to their hometown where the standard of living began to improve. In anticipating the exodus of reverse migration, LOVEME2030 wishes to defer the unfinished love stories until year 2030. Love me, not now, not here. LOVE ME when I am gone.

Underground video was an important tool during the Marcos era and contributed to the Aquino revolution. In the rejuvenated atmosphere within traditional Philippine media institutions, President Aquino has become the protagonist in a soap opera and the brunt of ribald satiric humor. A skit on a weekly comedy show Six O'Clock News, where a genial Bush twists Aquino's arm for continued U.S. military bases. Next, an emotional melodrama uses double exposure and surreal juxtapositions to address the current military repression. The debates about U.S. bases in the Philippines are played out in TV genres marked by a unique display of national character.

A euphoric lesbian sex video features a group of women in a frenzy of erotic scenes with poetry, slowly dripping water, fancy goldfish, and an ecstatic score by Sheila Chandra. Experimenting with pro-sex feminist media practices and pornography, Sex Fish was made as a collaboration known as E.T. Baby Mania.

Three commentators sit in a news studio in front of a TV discussing the Tiananmen Square massacre as reported by local and foreign media. This film aims to examine the politics of image and the image of politics through commenting on the topics of democracy, media control, consumption and commercialism.

UKI’s storyline unfolds as we follow a defunct replicant REIKO dumped on Etrashville - a vast dump for tech - who tries to pull themselves back together with the help of Etrashville's transgenic inhabitants. Parallel to REIKO’s trajectory is that of an infected city where we are made aware of the reckless schemes of the biotech enterprise, GENOM Co.

Virus Becoming is a sketch for the birth of UKI from Cheang's full length feature film UKI (2023). Reiko, a defunct humanoid, was deemed redundant and dumped as a piece of electronic trash, only re-emerge as the virus UKI to reclaim her pleasure, autonomy, and agency.

LOVER LOVE, a new commission for the Leslie-Lohman Museum of Art by Shu Lea Cheang (b. 1954), begins with a portal. A window is flung open and the gray wall of an apartment block dissolves into a turbulent, overcast sky, against which a smoky being is enveloped by a six-winged seraphim—an angel of the highest order. This collaboratively scripted film moves between physical and virtual space: between performances in a motel room, a junkyard, and city streets amid surrounding nature, we can see desert plants blooming anthropomorphic appendages and souls escaping inhuman oppression to take transhuman flight.

How did they make it? The unbearable innocent fingers and kisses. Colors on the screens, your, hers, mine... Cheang has taken her camera to the streets for a candid glimpse of lesbian public sexuality. The film challenges to the question "What do lesbians do?"

The artwork on trial is Richard Serra's public sculpture, Tilted Arc, commissioned and installed by the U.S. government in 1981. Four years later, a public hearing was held to consider the removal of the sculpture from its site in Federal Plaza in New York City. In documenting the climatic General Services Administration hearing, The Trial Of Tilted Arc is a thought-provoking indictment of the state of the arts. At issue is the validity of a contract between an artist and the government, the freedom of artistic expression, and the "public's" involvement in designing the visual environment. The dialogue/debate between the art community and the bureaucrats has described this site-specific art work in terms ranging from "masterpiece" to "mouse trap."

All forms of human sport become sites for sexual play and celebratory eroticism. “The tape’s images are quick, suggestive, and sexy: fingers moving into bowling balls, shoe-smelling and toe-sucking, a dog wearing chain jewelry, fish being wrapped at the market, young naked couples having sex.... Edited like a music video, the image track is a constant flow of fetishes that lure us into the promiscuous pace of girls who keep lists of their sexual encounters.” —Chris Straayer

Ten films present ten historical and contemporary case studies of individuals who have been outcasted or incarcerated due to reasons of gender variance, sexual preference, or racial differences.

Departing from this Madrid Centre’s rebellious past, Wonders Wander takes the wonders out of Malasaña to explore off-the-mainstream nouveau queer generation that includes refugees, migrants, functional diversity, transfeminista, transfeminism, open family, subversive motherhoods, sustainable living, and the rise of auto-defense practices for self-empowerment. Wonders Wander with its gps guided city-walks tracks sites of documented homo-trans-phobic attacks that extend to peripheral Madrid.

She loves her, and she loves her too. She is Japanese and she is Australian. The awkward fitting of bodies into a small space is just one of the allegorical scenarios dramatized in a pressing appeal for lesbian rights.

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A film made for multimedia artist Shu Lea Cheang’s first art installation features a series of bowlers staring into the lens of the camera, preparing to make a move. Commissioned by the Walker Art Center.

This program illustrates how video activists have developed sophisticated use of small format video, with poetic and powerful imagery, complex mixes of sounds and scores and an effective editing style that belies the urgency under which it is being made. The video movement in Taiwan has made successful use of home cassette distribution, via both mail and street vendors. The Green Team collective has pioneered in this effort with over 100 titles in distribution, documenting the struggles of farmers, students, workers and environmentalists.

Reiko is a sex robot programmed to accumulate sexual experience. She goes through seven body types to experiences a variety of couplings. She returns to the company to download her accumulated info and escape from their control.