3X3X6 Shu Lea Cheang 鄭淑麗
On occasion of the 58th Venice Biennale, Shu Lea Cheang transformed Palazzo delle Prigioni, the former prison architecture, into a space of high-tech surveillance apparatus. Cheang investigated ten cases of imprisonment due to gender, sexual and racial dissent, from historical subjects to contemporary ones. Using “transfunk, queer, and anti-colonial imagination,” Cheang’s video installation countered the history of sexuality, that is, the history of subjection and resistance. What produces criminal bodies as such, and how do the form of legal and visual controls shape the subjectivity in the digital era? In the exhibition, 3D camera system was installed, thereby “gender and racial morphing become queer digital strategies to disrupt the tradition of colonial and anthropometric identification techniques”.1 The publication 3X3X6 Shu Lea Cheang, acompanied with the exhibition, provides a profound discussion on the construction of heteronormative, patriarchal knowledge as well as a contemporary witch hunt amid today’s escalated global capitalism and digital surveillance. (M.N)
“the artist practices what we could call fictional disobedience: Her ways of coding and narrating oppose the hegemonic narrative that criminalizes sexual, gender, and racial minorities; she questions the norms that have established the difference between the normal and the pathological, the real and the virtual, the socially recognized and the invisible.”
– Paul B. Preciado
1. Paul B. Preciado, “Dissident Interfaces: Shu Lea Cheang’s 3x3x6 and the Digital Avant-Garde”, Shu Lea Cheang 3X3X6, 2019; 86.
2. Recalling an imprisonment of a teenager Maedeh Hojabri in 2018 in Iran for posting a dance video on Instagram, which led to countless posts of #dancingisnotacrime in protest worldwide, the exhibition 3X3X6 invited visitors to submit selfie dance video “in solidarity, in defiance, in seeking self-gratification or collective revolt. Visit https://3x3x6.com/submit
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The publication is edited by Paul B. Preciado, published by Taipei Fine Arts Museum, 臺北市立美術館 (Taipei, Taiwan), and accessible online at Taiwan in Venice.
background image: Shu Lea Cheang, 3X3X6, mixed media installation
© Shu Lea Cheang. Courtesy of the artist and Taiwan in Venice 2019
(suggestion by M.N)