Set up view of Shu Lea Cheang, “Home Delivery” (2025) (all photographs Ela Bittencourt/Hyperallergic)
MUNICH — After I first noticed Shu Lea Cheang’s work on the Munich Worldwide Movie Competition two years in the past, she buoyantly suggested her viewers to sneak out to the toilet or go away the cinema if her porn-infused science-fictions’ graphic intercourse scenes overwhelmed (or, wink, impressed) them — a cheeky problem only a few viewers took up. I feel that anecdote may simply sum up the Taiwanese-American artist’s distinctive mix of artwork, tech, and porn, or her penchant for provocation.
At first look, Cheang’s extra somber science- and technology-minded survey, Shu Lea Cheang: Kiss Kiss Kill Kill at Haus der Kunst, comprising work culled from the previous three many years, has little to do together with her erotic fantasies, akin to her movie I.Ok.U. (2000), depicting orgasms and sperm as shiny commodities, or the lesbian intercourse reverie “Sex Fish” (1993). For one, there’s hardly any flesh to see right here. This doesn’t imply, nonetheless, that Cheang tempers her strategy; the physique may be very a lot current, albeit much less instantly. And whereas the exhibition’s mise-en-scène is extra spare than one would anticipate from her typical intense technicolor dystopias, Cheang’s febrile, fantastical narratives make this comparatively compact survey really feel like rather more than the sum of its elements.
Take, as an example, Cheang’s set up “Spoken Words” (2025), which mixes components of her earlier works, “Baby Work” (2012) and “Utter” (2023). From the latter, she reprises an animated avatar whose gender and race hold altering. This determine is proven on a big central display, at first gagged, then disgorging laptop computer keys (a few of these lie on the ground within the nook). In the meantime, it borrows from the previous work the assorted keyboards set on low platforms surrounding the display. Strike the keys to listen to phrases uttered aloud — I caught “suck,” “nipple,” “dildo,” and “mistress,” suggesting that Cheang is primarily involved in sexual language AI applied sciences might censor.
Set up view of Shu Lea Cheang “Portal To The Next” (2022), tree trunks and logs, shiitake mushrooms, audio system, sensors, laptop, metallic, rust, plastic, rubber, spray paint on metallic
Extra broadly, one may say that Cheang is anxious with the methods expertise permits not solely commodification but additionally management of all human exercise, from communication to nourishment to intercourse. In her set up “Home Delivery” (2025), for instance — once more that includes components drawn her earlier work, on this case “Drive By Dining” (2002) — two robots transfer alongside tracks, selecting up cardboard bins, like those utilized in meals deliveries, and throwing them into piles alongside the partitions. The robots’ soundless choreography is rote and inflexible; it soberly conveys the extent to which even probably the most primal of human wants, akin to consuming, now depend on technological networks. But “Home Delivery” takes on a special tenor when you learn the exhibition textual content, which explains that Cheang imagines the machines as a part of a post-food supply future during which robots now aimlessly retrace their routes.
“Home Delivery” additionally hints at Cheang’s strategy to technological waste, viewing it on the one hand as a literal, bodily surroundings threatening to engulf the human and on the opposite as a renewable useful resource, similar to natural materials. This concept underpins Cheang’s final massive set up at Haus der Kunst, “Portal Porting” (2025), derived from “Composting the Net” (2012) and “Portal to the Next” (2022). The previous consists of a number of screens with operating textual content sourced from web mailing lists, which appeared to vary from artist proposals to tutorial papers. One can pause them by putting keyboard keys. Standing within the midst of the set up feels very very like info overload, like being awash in information. Cheang, nonetheless, appears to view it extra as a supply to repurpose or presumably hack into. This hopeful message is embodied by the central object within the room, drawn from “Portal to the Next”: a burned-out automobile wreck sprouting massive fungi, surrounded by massive tree trunks that will have precipitated the crash, likewise blooming fungi. The work appears to counsel that info networks and information are additionally fungi- or spore-like: Their DNA, so to talk, comprises the blueprint for suppression, but additionally for liberation.
Shu Lea Cheang, “Portal Porting” (2025)
Liberation may simply be the central metaphor of the meditative, flowy video “Escape Artist” (2018/25). Per the curatorial textual content, it originates from one more earlier work, “UKI Virus Rising,” which is in flip a part of Cheang’s sci-fi alt-reality undertaking UKI (2023). In it, Reiko, a former intercourse employee dumped on a digital landfill, remakes herself with e-trash right into a contagious virus — a picture of viral mutability and generative energy, notably since Reiko finally rises to save lots of the planet. At Haus der Kunst, the picture of blood cells floating peacefully throughout a pink background might not have the identical explosive vitality because the insurgent Reiko does within the movie, however it however left me considering of the human physique itself as a potent, porous, and due to this fact hackable system.
Set up view of Shu Lea Cheang, “Escape Artist” (2018/25), video, CGI animation
Set up view of Shu Lea Cheang, “Home Delivery” (2025)
Set up view of Shu Lea Cheang, “Home Delivery” (2025)
Shu Lea Cheang: Kiss Kiss Kill Kill continues at Haus der Kunst (Prinzregentenstraße 1, Munich, Germany) by way of August 8. The exhibition was curated by Sarah Johanna Theurer with Laila Wu.
