My Grand Schemes with Shu Lea Cheang

image: 

Location(s)

Shu Lea Cheang, an artist and digital activist, was an early champion of the use of New Media Platforms as a way to create Time Based Art. Her works are characterized by an openness of form and the participation of the viewer/audience in the development of the narrative.

Ms. Cheang will be joined by award winning independent filmmaker Rea Tajiri for a discussion about the logistical, aesthetic, and financial challenges in creating truly open and participatory new media art projects.

Ms. Cheang will also present excerpts from Brandon, in homage to Brandon/Teena Brandon of Nebraska, USA, a gender-crossing individual who was raped and murdered in 1993 after his female anatomy was revealed. Brandon, billed as the Guggenheim Museum’s first webs based art commission, was conceived as a one year narrative on the web.

She will also talk about Coin Locker Baby trilogy, a three part installation that includes Baby Play, realized in 2001 at the NTT Intercommunication Center, Tokyo; Baby Love, commissioned in 2005 by the National Taiwan Museum of Arts and premiered at Palais de Tokyo in Paris; and Baby Work, yet to be realized.

The evening will also include excerpts from Moving Forest, a 12 hour, five act sonic performances realized at Transmediale, Berlin in 2008.

-----------------------------------------
“Shu Lea Cheang's projects link issues of technological emancipation with the strengthening of the freedoms of expression, movement and civic rights. She is known for complex and participative 'open' art works, which engage different forms of urbanism and 'user' groups. As such, in Shu Lea's practice, the act of artistic expression has an overt political connotation, even where a piece itself is not political or equipped with a specific political agenda per se. This trajectory unfolds as a complex artistic social experiment in which the form of expression is not pinned to any specific medium”

--- Stephen Kovats
Director of Transmediale, Berlin
July 2009

Ms. Cheang is currently involved in the following collective projects:

TAKE2030 Media Collective based in London.

LaptopsRus, woman live performers' network initiative.

Andes Sprouts Society, a media art and farming residency project, based in Andes, New York.

----------------------------------------

Producers’ Forums are supported by the National Endowment for the Arts, Philadelphia Cultural Fund, the Pennsylvania Council on the Arts, and the Independence Foundation.