“3X3X6” by Shu Lea Cheang is curated by Paul B. Preciado and presented by the Taipei Fine Arts Museum at Palazzo delle Prigioni in Venice. Taiwan’s representation at the 58th Venice Biennale engages with the history of the exhibition site – the prison palace – by reflecting on different technologies of confinement and control, ranging from physical incarceration to the omnipresence of surveillance systems in contemporary society. The multimedia research project expands on Shu Lea Cheang’s artistic practice over the last three decades, and includes images, installations and computer programming that merge the dimensions of past and present, as well as the real and the virtual.
Shu Lea Cheang grew up in Taiwan, where she was born in 1954, and developed an artistic practice in the United States and Europe, creating a dialogue between Western and Eastern contemporary approaches to the body, desire, affect and technology. She has long been internationally recognised as an Internet art pioneer, whose work explores the changing relationships between technology and the human body in the age of late capitalism and globalisation, and the impact these connections have on body politics. Cheang’s practice incorporates critical and visual elements of feminist and queer cultures with cutting-edge digital and electronic technologies, as well as computer programmes. Her performative artworks, presented online and offline – her films, installations, interactive interfaces and live performances – are a meditation on the power of images and fictions to transform and challenge the normative representations of gender, sexuality and race.
For her site-specific project in Venice, Shu Lea Cheang took inspiration from ten historical and contemporary figures, creating ten cases of imprisonment due to gender, sexual and racial nonconformity. The project questions how legal and visual regimes shape sexual and gender norms over time. The title “3X3X6” refers to a nine-square-metre cell constantly monitored by six cameras, the new architectural model of industrial prisons developed globally. The project combines the physical space with a surveillance programme devised by the artist to engage with notions of freedom and control within contemporary democratic societies.
Cheang has transformed the Palazzo delle Prigioni into a high-tech surveillance territory, using fictional and real data collected from history as well as live interactions. Computer algorithms mix three image sources for the installation projection in the first gallery, including the images of individual viewers on-site (with their consent) and their selfies taken with a smartphone application. A computer programme hacks these real images and reprogrammes them into transgender and cross-racial digital images that resist surveillance networks.
Ultimately, Shu Lea Cheang encourages visitors to imagine a society without prisons, not only physical ones, but epistemological as well, such as those of gender, sexual and race categories. Paul B. Preciade has been quoted as saying about the project:
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
During the pre-opening days, ASIA spoke with Shu Lea Cheang about the exhibition, her work and her collaboration with Paul B. Preciado.
Congratulations on the show here in Venice. Let’s start from the beginning… What is the significance for you of exhibiting in Venice at the Biennale?
Of course it’s such an honour to represent Taiwan, to have a solo show at such an international platform. I am very grateful to have been given such an opportunity to realise a project on such a big scale. At the same time Venice is a much bigger platform, there are a lot of important artists here, it’s also a good chance to see things and to learn.
How long was “3x3x6” in the making, with all the research involved and the works’ development?
It took a year, but it’s a very short time, because since I got announced to be representing Taiwan in Venice, it was only just last May.
Could you expand a bit about the concept of the exhibition?
At the beginning, when I started doing the research, I was thinking about the Palazzo Delle Prigioni, which is of course quite famous for being a prison in the past. During my research I found out that here was imprisoned Casanova, and this kind of gave me some imagination about the time when Casanova was accused, maybe for his love affairs and his problem with religion… so coming from all this, I started thinking of wanting to create a project that dealt with sexual dissidents and sex crimes.
Could you tell me more about this latter, pivotal aspect of the exhibition, the theme of sexuality?
I really focus on people because of gender or different sexual activities, or what we consider a sexual dissident… because of that, such people were imprisoned. There are cases like Michel Foucault, who was imprisoned in Poland because he was found to be a homosexual. Casanova was imprisoned because, you could say, he had some conflict with religion, he was promoting the use of condoms at the time, in the 18th century. And then there is the Marquis de Sade, who of course is quite a famous character…
And then I also dig into some contemporary cases. And through all these different cases we start to understand how people were imprisoned for their differing sexual activities, and I really wanted to dig into the study of sex crimes, so that’s why in the end I present ten cases and ten personalities.
Does this exploration of notions of gender and sexuality somehow fit into a political context?
I think so. I think in general there is more social pressure for people because of gender differences and also for transgender people.
What about the use of technology in your work?
All of my work is mixed media installation. And particularly for this one, I was digging into facial recognition technology, and how to hack it, considering that we live in such a high surveillance society, with facial recognition used to track people, including all the data presented… in a way we are living in a sort of data panopticon. For me it is important to recognise this fact and at the same time, we think about the issue of resistance, how to resist, and if there is a way out of this highly surveilled society. In a way we are always using social platforms, uploading on Facebook, uploading our personal data, but there is always a lot of government controlled data.
This makes me wonder if you were also considering the notion of censorship and self-censorship in your work…
You might have seen that I really want to openly show the human body and its bodily functions, like for example, if there is a scene of masturbation, you can really see it, and I think it’s quite normal. You know, I really consider bodies beautiful, so why not reveal them?
Could you expand a bit about the gender and identity politics explored in your work here and in general?
I think that from Brandon in 1998-1999, in which I deal with Brandon Tina’s story happening in Nebraska, in the United States, I started considering the notion of transgender, and how a transgender person was revealed because his friends doubted he was actually a girl, so they raped him and in the end they murdered him. It was quite a news item in 1993, and at that time I took that particular piece of news to work on that project.
In my work I am quite political, in terms of my gender and sexual politics. It think that if people choose to have different sexual lifestyles and different sexual inclinations, we are not the ones to judge. And particularly with all these crime cases, I am not trying to make an appeal or any judgement, I just present them objectively, but there are also the news items, the court documents, and then the person as a real person, with love, sexual desires, and so on. In the end, you do not consider them as criminals anymore… At the same time, I am not appealing for them, to say they committed no crime.
How do the three spaces of the exhibition tie in together?
Right from the beginning we wanted to connect the three spaces, but they are more like four galleries, A B C and D. Gallery A is the projection tower, an inversion of the panopticon tower. Here, instead of the surveillance eye, you see ten projectors, which serve to introduce the ten cases and ten characters, and I allow different interventions to come in. Images come in from the surveillance camera and images come in from the app. Once you get into the galleries B and C, you kind of select yourself which videos to watch. Here you have ten cases, each is a ten-minute segment. I chose to make each case into a fantastical imagination, at the same time there are a lot of court document narratives that I am using. Once you get through this and you walk to gallery D, there is a smaller space where you see a thirty-degree inclined cube, which has all the electronic equipment that runs the whole exhibition, and runs the whole surveillance system, so it’s controlling the surveillance camera, and also controlling how the images get sent to the gallery A. It’s a control room, but I chose to make it simple, with the cube containing all the equipment, instead of it being visually identifiable in the room.
It gives a feeling of a sci-fi environment…
Yes, I hope so! It’s almost unreal, but you know this is like a miniature of the larger controlled society we live in, isn’t it?
So you are into creating work that is rather futuristic…
Yes, I made two sci-fi films among my three long feature films. One is called Fresh cue?Flash cue? in 1994, and in 2000 I released another film called I K U. And in 2017 I released a film called ….zero. Two premiered at the Berlinale, the Berlin film festival, and one at Sundance. They got a limited theatrical release.
The first, which I shot in New York, was about the industrial waste exported to third world countries, and how garbage comes back to haunt America. There is a little sci-fi but it is also a family drama. The second film is more of a science-fiction, I shot it in Tokyo, and the last one is about the AIDS crisis which I experienced in the late 1980s in New York. All the films are narrative drama films.
Are you in some way interested in influencing socio-political change, especially through your exploration of gender and sexuality issues?
Well, yes, I think that as long as I keep promoting sexual and gender diversity to be accepted, sometimes by presenting it in such an elegant, beautiful way, maybe can change people’s perspective. Society still has a lot of discrimination. My work could be at the same time shocking for certain people, while others can accept it more easily.
I think that any artist would hope that their work can have a certain impact or appreciation, to make people realise certain things. At the same time, I don’t think that artists and me as an artist myself have such a power to change society per se.
Are you based out of Taiwan? How is Taiwan about gender acceptance?
No, I have been out of Taiwan for most of my life, I have lived in New York for 20 years, and now I live in Paris. I have been away from Taiwan for so long, so I don’t know how it was before, but for the last couple years I have been going back frequently because of my project and I really find such a beautiful generation, open and pretty progressive. It seems the government is quite tolerant, and Taiwan will soon become the first Asian country to allow gay marriage. For me it’s quite amazing that the country has developed in its own way, and gay people there fight very hard to get those rights. So I really congratulate them.
Finally, about your collaboration with the curator, Paul B. Preciado. I know you have been working together for a long time… how did this collaboration come about?
Actually the selection process for Venice in Taiwan is quite interesting… I was selected as the representing artist, and I was asked to select the curator to work with me. I had worked with Paul before, he has curated my work a few times in the past. For Venice, I wasn’t selected because of a proposal I submitted. I was first selected and then I could decide what subject to explore, and I decided to go with the sex and gender topic, and so I though about Paul right away, if he had time to do it, as he was curator of Documenta and was very busy. And he agreed right away, as we had worked together before and we had met in Paris several times.
It was really great, and he got really involved in the process of research, in the script, and we actually share the script writing credits. He also offered me such great advice, really more like a ‘comrade’… if you consider that to finish this project in one year was like a battle! So I always say that the people who worked with me, the team in Taiwan, the construction and the film crew in Berlin, who made the films with me, they all worked with me as if fighting in a battle, we had deadlines to finish, and Paul has been great along the way, guiding me a lot. I would say I have never worked with a curator so closely together. It’s very unusual. He is very famous in transgender studies, he has published a book about sexuality, and he is quite well-known in this particular area. It was a perfect match.
C. A. Xuân Mai Ardia