Shu Lea Cheang

UKI’s storyline unfolds as we follow a defunct replicant REIKO dumped on Etrashville - a vast dump for tech - who tries to pull themselves back together with the help of Etrashville's transgenic inhabitants. Parallel to REIKO’s trajectory is that of an infected city where we are made aware of the reckless schemes of the biotech enterprise, GENOM Co.

LOVER LOVE, a new commission for the Leslie-Lohman Museum of Art by Shu Lea Cheang (b. 1954), begins with a portal. A window is flung open and the gray wall of an apartment block dissolves into a turbulent, overcast sky, against which a smoky being is enveloped by a six-winged seraphim—an angel of the highest order. This collaboratively scripted film moves between physical and virtual space: between performances in a motel room, a junkyard, and city streets amid surrounding nature, we can see desert plants blooming anthropomorphic appendages and souls escaping inhuman oppression to take transhuman flight.

Shareen and Claire, a lesbian couple living on Staten Island, find themselves ensnared in a vast conspiracy involving a ghost ship of nuclear refuse, ominous television commercials, and deadly cat food.

It is the year 2060 and AIDS has been eradicated. However, in some, the HIV virus has now mutated into a gene from which a drug can be produced that has become the white powder of the twenty-first century. With a virtually supported scanning system, secret police are trying to identify anyone who carries this gene. Filmed in Berlin, Taiwan-born multimedia artist and filmmaker Shu Lea Cheang’s science fiction dystopia revolves around a struggle to gain control over the production and exploitation of bodily fluids. Her film is like an orgiastic opera; a breathless round of bodies, secretions, performances and sexual acts often performed in the service of an overriding economy. An unusual, largely experimental and deliberately parapornographic drama in which the borders between the sexes as well as homo-, hetero-, bi-, trans- or intersexual are constantly blurred.

A euphoric lesbian sex video features a group of women in a frenzy of erotic scenes with poetry, slowly dripping water, fancy goldfish, and an ecstatic score by Sheila Chandra. Experimenting with pro-sex feminist media practices and pornography, Sex Fish was made as a collaboration known as E.T. Baby Mania.

A film made for multimedia artist Shu Lea Cheang’s first art installation features a series of bowlers staring into the lens of the camera, preparing to make a move. Commissioned by the Walker Art Center.

"Welcome to the Fisting Club, The first rule of the Fisting Club is : Never talk about the Fisting Club."

She loves her, and she loves her too. She is Japanese and she is Australian. The awkward fitting of bodies into a small space is just one of the allegorical scenarios dramatized in a pressing appeal for lesbian rights.