3x3x6 - Padiglione di Taiwan

Fra gli eventi collaterali si svolgerà anche la partecipazione di Taiwan come sempre presso il Palazzo delle Prigioni, accanto al Palazzo Ducale.

Il Museo delle Belle Arti di Taipei, promotore dell’evento, presenterà l’artista Shu Lea Cheang, con la curatela di Paul B. Preciado, che proporrà il progetto multimediale “Today  3x3x6”

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Taipei Fine Arts Museum, along with artist Shu Lea Cheang and curator Paul B. Preciado, have the pleasure to announce today 3x3x6, the new project representing Taiwan at the 58th Venice Biennale in 2019. Expanding on the artist’s practice over the last three decades, Cheang presents a new multimedia research project, including images, installations, and computer programming, in which past and present, virtual and real worlds converge.

Born in 1954, Cheang grew up in Taiwan and developed an artistic practice in the US and Europe, putting into dialogue Western and Eastern contemporary approaches to the body, desire, affect, and technology. Internationally recognized as an Internet art pioneer, Cheang explores the changing relationship between technology and living bodies in the age of late capitalism and globalization, and its impact on body politics. Cheang combines the critical and visual traditions coming from feminist and queer cultures with cutting-edge digital/electronic technologies and computer programs to create performative artworks online and offline. Her films, installations, interactive interfaces, and live performances are a meditation on the power of images and fictions to undo normative representations of gender, sexuality, and race.

The Palazzo delle Prigioni, a prison across from the Palazzo Ducale, will house the exhibition in Venice. Taking this location as an opportunity for a site-specific work, Cheang will create an immersive installation with multiple interfaces to reflect on different technologies of confinement and control, from physical incarceration to omnipresent surveillance systems in contemporary society. Using as inspiration ten historical and contemporary cases of imprisonment due to gender, sexual, and racial nonconformity, 3x3x6 questions how legal and visual regimes shape sexual and gender norms over time. The title, 3x3x6, refers to the new architectural model of industrial prisons developed globally: a 9-square-meter cell constantly monitored by 6 cameras. Combining physical space with a surveillance program, the project speaks about the new conditions of freedom and control within contemporary democratic societies. The installation is an invitation to imagine a society without prisons, but further a society beyond the epistemological prison of gender, sexual, and race categories.

Taking as starting point the panopticon interface she created in Brandon (1998–99)—the first Internet art commissioned and collected by the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum in New York—Cheang transforms the exhibition space at the Palazzo delle Prigioni into a high-tech surveillance territory infused with fictional and real data collected from history as well as live interactions. Computer algorithms mix three image sources for the installation projection, including the images of individual viewers on-site (with their consent) and their selfies taken with a smartphone application. A computer program will hack these real images and reprogram them into transgender and cross-racial digital images that resist surveillance networks.

Cheang is conducting in-depth studies on prototypes across history to form ten characters, including Giacomo Casanova, Michel Foucault, and Marquis de Sade, towards developing ten fictional transpunk videos in sci-fi and abstract image format. Involving legal documents, fake news, historical reports, myths and fantasies, the work leads visitors into a maze of multiple narratives, where the distance between the one who represents and the one represented, the observer and the observed is radically quested. “Cheang forces visitors to interrogate the distance between punishment and pleasure, surveillance and lust, between the system that is apparently watching us and we as actively participating and enjoying the act of surveillance. 3x3x6 explores the relationship between political punishment and sexual enjoyment, between modes of seeing and processes of subject production. Inverting the watchful eyes of our panoptic society to partake in an empowering collective vision, the exhibition aims to reinvent desire and pleasure beyond hegemonic norms,” says curator Preciado.

Cheang states, “With this exhibition we explore the possible strategies for resistance against highly controlled societies, the self-affirming dignity against repression, and the variable versions of self-granted pursuits for (un)happiness.”

In the auditorium of TFAM on November 27th at 2 p.m., the artist Shu Lea Cheang and curator Paul B. Preciado will be in conversation with Audrey Tang, social innovator and the first minister without portfolio on digital affairs in Taiwan; the conversation is titled “Democracy in Transition: Freedom, Art, and Cooperative Action in the Fourth Industrial Revolution.” Departing from the exhibition project, they will discuss how art, activism, digital technologies, and critical discourses interact to invent new social practices and new subjectivities.

Taiwan’s Representation at the 58th Venice Biennale 2019

3x3x6

Exhibition period: May 11–November 24, 2019

Venue: Palazzo delle Prigioni, Venice, Italy

Lea Cheang - Taiwan

Taro's mushroom - transmediale 2017

L'artista Lea Cheang rappresenterà Taiwan 

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Artist Shu Lea Cheang to Represent Taiwan at 2019 Venice Biennale │ Press

Date：2018/07/12 - 2018/12/31 

Type：Press Release

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

Padiglione di Taiwan

Il Padiglione di Taiwan, come da diversi anni, trova spazio presso il Palazzo delle Prigioni, accanto a Palazzo Ducale. Gli artisti proposti sono Chia-Wei Hsu, Bernd Behr, e Katerina Šedá. Curatore è Esther Lu, con la commissione del Taipei Fine Arts Museum, che dal 1995 segue e organizza l’avvenimento. Il progetto si lega al tema centrale del “Palazzo Enciclopedico” in un’attenzione al processo storico della trasformazione, al principio dell’evoluzione, del cambiamento. Ulteriori dettagli al sito www.tfam.museum  

Padiglione Taiwan

Curator Amy Cheng Artists Hong-Kai Wang, Yu-Hsien Su
Sound Library/Bar:
Designer Kuo-Chang Liu Content researchers and organizers Tieh-Chih Chang, Jeph Lo
Performing Artists: Fujui Wang, Chi-Wei Lin, DJ @llen

Sede Palazzo delle Prigioni

The Heard and the Unheard - Soundscape Taiwan explores Taiwans social soundscape. Sound, as protagonist of the exhibition, appears both in its role as a medium and as a metaphorical site for political actions. By adopting sound as both substance and aesthetic form, the exhibition explores the non-mainstream cultural context of contemporary Taiwanese society through the work of two artists and the inclusion of the Sound Library/Bar.

Hong-Kai Wangs (b.1971) Music While We Work investigates the collective experience of listening and recording at a specific social space of labor and production. Wang collaborates with an over 100-year old sugar factory and invites a group of retired workers and their spouses to return to the historic industrial site. Through recording workshops they learn to take charge of the microphone and to later record sounds found at their former workplace.

Yu-Hsien Su's (b.1982) Sounds of Nothing is about the lives of common people, including foreign boatmen, a scavenger and a vagrant. Invited participants make their own music and Su compiles their recordings into albums under his newly-launched label indi-indi. The albums, with peoples unpracticed, dissonant or improvised music, highlight the existence of individuals and provide a metaphor for different voices in society.

The audio-visual installation and documentation presented in the Sound Library/Bar outline the evolution of local history by providing a narrative of the sound of social movements and of sound production since the lifting of martial law in 1987. The preview features performances by sound/performing artists Fujui Wang, Chi-Wei Lin and DJ @llen.