Hybridity is the name of Shu Lea Cheang's game. Her co-participants are artists and cyber-communitarians everywhere. The artist's earlier participation in the activist video/media art movement of the 1980s has slowly mutated to incorporate new communications technologies -- like the Internet -- to explore modes of subversion, collaboration, and collectivity.
Cheang describes herself as having gone from a "developing artist to a hi-tech aborigine." She notes that "being a pick-up artist of hi-tech leftovers, I thrive in the cyber-fringe zone." Both of these statements evidence her commitment to the marginalized identities that are often closed out of new, technologically mediated public spheres. As a "third-world" (Taiwan-born), lesbian woman working with high technology, Cheang is suspicious of the utopian rhetoric that race and gender will simply cease to matter in online life. Her works, therefore, use interactive technologies to deal with issues of power and control, questioning the role of interactivity as society's saving grace and the idea that technology is an end in itself. She is interested in the hybridity of spaces emerging in Internet culture -- playing upon the actual versus the virtual, on public versus private space, and on mainstream versus subcultural affiliations, which she sees as possibly unsettled in online communities.
From the start, her work was also concerned with the political aspects and subversive potentials of technology. She has worked as an independent filmmaker, creating the feature-length film "Fresh Kill" in 1994. She has also used technology to tie together Installation pieces: 1990's "Color Schemes" incorporated washing machines into a filmed discourse about racial identity and assimilation; 1993's "Those Fluttering Objects of Desire" used the format of phone-sex lines and pornographic-video booths to conduct personal stories of interracial sexual desire, which Shu Lea Cheang had collected from 25 female artists.
In recent years, Cheang's work has tended toward the increasingly intangible. 1995's "Bowling Alley" linked the Walker Art Center in Minneapolis to a real bowling alley via a web site and an online discussion involving collaborating artists. In a complicated configuration of these three places, text derived from the discussion was processed and rearranged according to the actions of the bowlers and the online visitors, then displayed in the gallery and on the web site. Although fraught with technical difficulties (such as the prohibitively high bandwidth required to actually participate via the web), the project was conceptually exciting and marked a new direction in Shu Lea Cheang's career. Cheang has poetically described the way she views the ideological significance of the bowling project: "INTERface INterVENTION In Yer Face.We went bowling. Bowling is a demolition apparatus. Scattered body parts are the coded databody. Forsake the cyborg anxiety. Bandaged demarcation, circuited damage, marks interface as intervention."
Cheang has since been commissioned by the Guggenheim Museum to create the "Brandon Project," a Net art site that is a tribute of sorts to Nebraskan Teena Renee Brandon, a transgenderist who was raped and murdered in 1994. Since issues of gender and sexuality are so foregrounded in discussions of online culture, and because Brandon had become "a celebrated figure for gender activism on the Web," this case was deemed sufficiently salient to be the focus of the Guggenheim's highly anticipated venture into cyberspace. Shu Lea Cheang, who has long dealt with sites of sexual subversion, and who sports both a background in high-tech art and a commitment to activist causes, made the perfect facilitator of this collaborative project.
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