by William Kherbek // Jan. 31, 2025
This article is part of our feature topic Cycles.
Shu Lea Cheang is a ground-breaking Taiwanese artist whose works have long considered the cycles of growth and decay in rural, urban and digital environments, as well as the ways in which organic and non-organic forms of production are folded into logics of technology and capital. Cheang’s powerful and hilarious (and prescient) early feature film ‘Fresh Kill’ (1994), for example, explores the long feedback loops of production and pollution, looking closely at the Fresh Kills Landfill on Staten Island in New York City. Later projects have deepened a long-standing fascination with—and anxiety about—technology in the artist’s oeuvre. A self-described “geek,” Cheang was active in the early days of Net Art. Her work ‘Composting the Net’ began in 2013 and has examined the ways in which the vast stratae of information that made up the early net can be recycled by future generations. Also a major figure in queer internet culture, Cheang’s moving ‘Brandon’ retold the tragic real life story of the trans youth Brandon Teena, murdered in 1993 by transphobic killers, imagining the potential of digital spaces as sites of queer liberation. We spoke to Shu Lea Cheang ahead of the opening of her survey exhibition at Munich’s Haus der Kunst.
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‘KI$$ KI$$’ from Shu Lea Cheang: ‘Fresh Kill,’ 1994 // © Shu Lea Cheang, Design: Wassily Erlenbusch
William Kherbek: I was originally introduced to your work with the film ‘Fresh Kill,’ which involves a number of narratives but which in particular focuses on the ways in which cultures deal with their waste, and how cycles of consumption and destruction feedback on each other. Could you take us into the way you were thinking about how these cycles connect in the work?
Shu Lea Cheang: It’s interesting to hear you mention ‘Fresh Kill’ as a work dealing with cycles—you can say “cycles” or “recycles,” [but] there are cycles. That was at a time when I was living in New York City. I’d started a project finding parallel relationships in waste circulation that would go from industrialized countries to developing countries; industrial junk would be shipped to Africa for reprocessing, or just as a dump. Taiwan’s government dumps nuclear waste on Lanyu Island, an aboriginal island, and New York City dumps its waste on Staten Island onto Fresh Kills Landfill. Fresh Kills used to be a dump but it has since been converted into a park. With ‘Fresh Kill,’ I was starting to think about these parallels of environmental racism. And the whole plot of ‘Fresh Kill’ is actually about how to reverse engineer this way of shipping or dumping, how a toxic fish will come back to haunt the people in Manhattan.
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Shu Lea Cheang: ‘KI$$ KI$$,’ 2025, installation views at Haus der Kunst // Photo by Milena Wojhan
WK: In both the film ‘Fresh Kill’ and the real world parallels it’s based on there’s a sense of never being able to escape the legacies that a society would prefer not to think about, but there’s ultimately no escape.
SLC: I think for me this is about interconnectedness. Currently, I’m working on a theater project and it’s based on the Gaia Principle, the living principle of the cosmos, how the cosmos is interrelated and, in the end, we’re trying to find a balance. It’s about coming to a mutual trust.
WK: A number of your works consider this interconnected element. I’m thinking in particular of works such as ‘Composing the Net,’ which examines the ways in which information, in that context information from mailing lists, can be “recycled” in productive ways.
SLC: I’m actually working on ‘Composting the Net’ right now because I had to organize it for the exhibition at Haus der Kunst. So going back to the origins, today young people probably don’t even know what a mailing list is! You have X and social media today, but the mailing list is the old style of social media, a way of discussing in a networked platform, thinking about how we all contribute to all these networked platforms in the sense that we contribute our thoughts and our knowledge through sharing.
The good thing with a lot of these mailing lists, which date back to the 1990s, was that you could see that it was years of people contributing, posting in the mailing list, contributing ideas, and that becoming different kinds of discussion and knowledge; for example, on topics like networked culture or political debates. These lists are such an archive that are just sitting there, that nobody is aware of because nobody is paying attention to them now except for this small community, the members who post. ‘Composting the Net’ retrieves this data and considers how it may still have a certain value. And the data is so huge, accumulated over so many pixels. What do you do with all this data? It’s similar to when we think about junk: do you dump it, or recycle it or burn it? There is a certain line of thinking that it’s still useful in some way, so I applied that same thinking to digital data: that there could be compost. It’s about anticipating a new cycle of sprouts coming out from that rich soil. For me, the recycling of all this different data is partially a review, but also a preview. This is quite different from AI (though AI is using the same data) but there we’re talking about how it’s being appropriated.
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Shu Lea Cheang: ‘KI$$ KI$$,’ 2025, installation view at Haus der Kunst München // Photo by Milena Wojhan
WK: In talking about this “recycling,” a lot of data is used now in the way Shoshana Zuboff described in ‘The Age of Surveillance Capitalism,’ as “data exhaust,” data that the user creates in the simple act of using the internet apart from the specific characteristics of that use, e.g. logging on in a specific place is relevant to some advertisers who seek to link a specific user to a specific product at a specific time. Your work has imagined uses for “recycled data” as part of a cycle of waste and reprogramming, for example, in ‘The Locker Baby Project,’ which deals with using data as a way of training cloned babies.
SLC: ‘The Locker Baby Project’ started in 2001. At that time, there were rumors about how cloned babies had been produced in a lab, but the world didn’t know about it because it was still illegal. This idea gave me a whole imaginary narrative, and from that I created a three part series, which includes ‘Baby Play’ (2001), ‘Baby Love’ (2005) and ‘Baby Work’ (2012). Earlier, in the 90s, I was much more affected by cyborg theory; at the moment, we’re talking about bioengineering, using cells and the manipulation or reproduction of the cells of animals to reproduce human cells. In the future, if you get sick, you probably won’t get a surgery, but it could be easy to grow a replacement for, say, heart cells that could be grown out of a cow, and this has totally changed the idea of “human” composition.
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Shu Lea Cheang: ‘KI$$ KI$$,’ 2025, installation views at Haus der Kunst // Photo by Milena Wojhan
WK: The interface of humans and technology is increasingly involving these kinds of cybernetic aspects. One might think of neuralink and other explicitly “cyborg-ifying” technologies. I also think of your works ‘Buy One Get One’ (1997) and the performance ‘Drive by Dining’ (2002) as explorations of the ways in which humans, technology and data create a reinforced loop: people consume, create data, then the data is used to program the consumption pattern of humans…
SLC: ‘Drive by Dining,’ which I made in 2001, was a celebration of wifi. That was the time when A02.11, the bandwidth, was open to the public and public wifi became available, and we wanted to celebrate. I worked in London, New York and Berlin, working with free wifi activists trying to proclaim that “we own the web.” If we have free wifi, we should have a public share. In Berlin, there’s Freifunk, and of course now we talk about 4G, 5G, 6G, which is more controlled: data is surveilled by the government. I want to close down the whole wifi access in the gallery for this show, but I was told it wasn’t legal. There was a big debate. I wanted a room that did not have any wifi access.
For me, [the installation] ‘HoME delivery’ is the final end of that era of wifi. There has been a continuous thinking from the free wifi movement to today that wifi is just a means of government surveillance. Last year, I took a trip to Mongolia and roamed with shepherds, eating the whole sheep together. Having that kind of experience, it was like “wow, how do you justify modern living?” and to come back to see the food waste because of home delivery, the whole consumption of food has changed its mode completely. What it’s resulted in is that we accumulate so many food boxes as waste that that becomes another landscape to deal with.
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Shu Lea Cheang: ‘UKI,’ film still // Courtesy of the artist and Haus der Kunst Munich
WK: This idea of digital space as a landscape is quite useful to think about, not least as forms of enclosure with regard to data and to digital spaces (e.g. the metaverse) are advancing. You speak in your work about the notion of “porting” as opposed to “settling” in digital spaces. Could you take us into that idea a bit?
SLC: There are many ways I use the idea of porting in the different projects. When I did ‘Brandon,’ for example, for me the most important thing was teleporting Brandon Teena, the main character, from Nebraska to the internet. So there’s that way of talking about porting, or the physical travelling across borders as in a work from 1997 where I travelled across 16 countries in Africa and Asia with a digital suitcase. With porting, it’s definitely not about enclosure at all, but rather, the idea suggests that we remain constantly in motion. This particular constant of mobility could refer to the immigrant and refugee, who has to cross borders, but you can also talk about gender fluidity in terms of multiple gender identities that actually allow you to cross gender borders.
In the Haus der Kunst exhibition, I will have a room that is called ‘Portal Porting.’ In terms of this particular project, the idea came about during COVID. I started to read about the idea of the portal: maybe COVID is a portal to take us to another dimension. And this particular room, ‘Portal Porting,’ promises to launch you to another world!
Exhibition Info
Haus der Kunst
Shu Lea Cheang: ‘KI$$ KI$$’
Exhibition: Feb. 14–Aug. 3, 2025
hausderkunst.de
Prinzregentenstraße 1, 80538 Munich, click here for map