Shu Lea Cheang. A Sexual Panopticon
The cyberfeminist artist Shu Lea Cheang has been selected to represent Taiwan at the 58th Venice Biennale. Curated by
Paul B. Preciado, the pavilion explores the current global surveillance regime, gender hacking strategies and a genealogy of sexual persecutions. In conversation with Pierre-Alexandre Mateos & Charles Teyssou, the artist tells us about her Venice project.
“SHU LEA CHEANG: 3X3X6,” TAIWAN PAVILION, 58TH VENICE BIENNALE. MAY 11 – NOVEMBER 24.
PIERRE-ALEXANDRE MATEOS & CHARLES TEYSSOU : Could you introduce the project for the Taiwan pavilion at the 2019 Venice Biennale, curated by Paul B. Preciado?
SHU LEA CHEANG: The Taiwan Pavilion is located at Palazzo delle Prigioni, a prison built to supplement that of Palazzo Ducale where Casanova was jailed in 1755. I was interested in making an installation in a 18th-century prison complex. In Brandon (1998-1999), a commission for the Guggenheim Museum in New York, I built a virtual panopticon interface to house mental patients and sexual deviants. The current omnipresence of surveillance systems with facial recognition technology gives rise to a data panopticon. It goes beyond the boundaries of a prison’s four walls to enclose the whole society. The project for the pavilion combines the idea of the prison, the panopticon and the current data surveillance regime, while at the same time revisiting the theme of sexuality and gender. To get back to Brandon, at the time I did performances that presented online court sessions on sexual assault cases. Brandon Teena was a transgender man who was raped and killed in Nebraska in 1993. For the Venice Biennale, I am investigating the incarcerated beings convicted because of sexual and gender deviance.
3x3x6, the title of the project for the Taiwan pavilion, refers to the 9-square-meter cell monitored by six surveillance cameras where Swiss Islamic scholar Tariq Ramadan was confined at the Fleury-Mérogis prison in France last year. Why did you choose this case as a referential figure for the work?
When I was doing my research, it was reported that Ramadan was imprisoned in a 9-square-meter jail with 6 surveillance cameras next to a suspected terrorist. This is a standard for the disciplinary/isolation cells reserved for terrorists. I took it as a symbolic reference. The 6-camera surveillance system for one individual made me think of what is currently happening in China. The government has installed 200 million cameras over its 1.4 billion population so far. Zooming out from 3x3x6, one realizes how intense and omnipresent our surveillance society has become.
Beyond the prison and the control room, which already belong to an “ancient” technology of surveillance, your exhibition highlights the ubiquitous regime of surveillance that is both ethereal and reticular in scope.
The Palazzo delle Prigioni has four gallery spaces; I am working on a connected narrative as one walks through the four spaces. For the gallery A, which is the bigger space, I will be setting up a panopticon tower with ten projectors that broadcast three sources of images: 3D scanners set up at the staircases entering the building; dance selfies sent from a custom-designed app; portrait shots of ten performers who present ten sexual cases. All the images rendered by facial recognition software are further hacked. The gallery A is an immersive “watch/watched” experience. In the galleries B and C, I will display ten videos of sexual cases that I am currently shooting. They are ten minutes long and each has its own monitor. Lastly, the gallery D exposes the operating mechanism of the surveillance system. It will be a control room inspired by the one that Hugh Hefner installed in the Playboy Mansion to watch and record all actions taking place inside the rooms.
We live in the age of voluntary imprisonment, a bit like in Rem Koolhaas’ project Exodus, or the Voluntary Prisoners of Architecture (1972), where we prefer comfort, a digitally responsive environment, over privacy or freedom.
If any resistance can be possible, what would it be? A major part of the installation is about the hacking of the surveillance system, though I mostly consider it a mere poetic gesture. For example, we use facial recognition software to track facial data, but it is then reconfigured into a 3D neutral
gender avatar. In the data control societies, we have voluntarily submitted our data (social and physical) to the big data, big daddy mainframe. What would be the fundamental hack in a system that sets out to confine and control?
You consider the figure of the hacker not solely on the level of computability but also in the field of gender and racial technologies. Could you elaborate on this idea of the body as a program?
I think of the way I am dealing with gender and race issues as hacking acts. For example, the ten performers for the ten films are not selected with traditional casting principles. So Marquis de Sade is played by a woman and Casanova by a Taiwan-born American dancer. On a larger spectrum, I have been interested in the concept of hacking since the very early stage of my practice, but more with a focus on human/social conditions. Technology is a medium that can be applied to serve art. I am part of the hacking community in the electronic media field. I am extending the hacking tactics to intervene in current racial and gender profiling. The body is a hard drive that collects orgasm data in my movie I.K.U. (2000), a medium that carries the HIV virus through generations of mutation in FLUIDØ (2017), a zone occupied by biotech experimentation in UKI (2009-ongoing) and a trans-punk-fiction in 3x3x6 (2019).
It reminds me of the AI Compas that was used in the US to predict the defendant’s risk of committing more crimes, which was quickly found to have racial bias. A thread in your work is the concept of network, be it sexual, biological or social. Along with blockchain infrastructures and the notion of decentralized autonomous organization, the idea of a network without verticality has gained a lot of attention. How do you consider this evolution?
Blockchain in old language was called a distributed network. I have always made the distinction between the “Net” and “net” in network exercises. The Net refers to the internet, WWW (world wide web), the mega infrastructure. I have proclaimed that the Net crashed in 2002 with one project, Garlic=Rich Air. I have since engaged myself in constructing the “net,” the knitted, unwired network that is born out of a shared commons. For example, my work Mycelium Network Society, on view at the 2018 Taipei Biennial, considers mycelium as an afternature network, an underground network of imagination situated in a post-Internet mudland and powered by fungi, spores, culture, cooking, radio, transmission, installations, workshops and performances.
You describe the pavilion as a transpunk-fiction creating an anachronic community between the visitors, its hacked self and the various sexual explorers, deviants and criminals portrayed. We were curious to know if you would connect this project to the genealogy of experiments in the field of Cybernetic theater, or to Bertolt Brecht’s notion of “distanciation”?
One of the aspects of my work is to break down the boundary between the installation and the spectators, the stage and the audience. In traditional theaters, the viewers and the viewed are very clearly defined. Brecht dismissed this binary
theater by breaking away from acting, to address the audience directly. I copy this technique a lot in my art and film practices. At Palazzo delle Prigioni we invite the audience to walk through the space and engage with crime and punishment, as allegedly criminal cases are brought up and re-investigated. At the end, we reconsider the existence of the prison system, while at the same time we question the larger surveillance mechanism that imprisons us. When I say trans-punk-fiction, I see it as a trans-gender-sexual-racial-border teleporting through time and space. For example, in the pavilion project, Michel Foucault visits Tariq Ramadan in his confinement for a conversation on homosexuality and queer feminism; Sade visits a mysterious figure to discuss pleasure and lust; Casanova visits Feng X for a deep kiss.
You refer to this installation as a sex panopticon, and the exhibition hints at shedding light on the ambiguous relationship between punishment and pleasure, surveillance and lust.
Paul B. Preciado, as curator of this project, helped me to research the ten cases, and co-wrote the scripts for the videos with me. Each case is based on actual facts, but puts a fantasy spin on its fabricated scenarios. For example, everybody knows Casanova as a great lover, but he was indicted on religious grounds, partly for his advocacy of the use of condoms. For Sade, we focus on his writing of The 120 Days of Sodom in the Bastille prison. As for Foucault, we brought up his imprisonment in Poland for homosexual conduct. We also have cases like that of a Chinese girl incarcerated for posting sexual acts online, and female sperm bandits from Africa who are accused of kidnapping men to harvest sperm for profit. In all the scripts, we have added some unexpected pleasure elements, to make up for the physical confinement.
We often hear it said that the only sexual inventions of the 20th century are fisting and cyber-sex. In the past, you have also explored the idea of cybernetic desire in your movies or installations.
Ultimately, I declare myself a cyberfeminist, in keeping with VNS Matrix’s cyberfeminist manifesto, “We are the modern cunt, the clitoris is a direct line to the matrix.” In the 1990s we were cyberfinger-fucking at 56k modem speed. This year, I am releasing a queer porn, Fisting Club, EP1, commissioned by London’s Boiler Room. Fingers and fists get me through the tunnels to reach the other end.
You spoke about the Chinese camera surveillance system and, more generally, how China was at the forefront of the global surveillance system. On the opposite end of the spectrum, the digital democracy we see emerging in Taiwan is very promising.
I have not lived in Taiwan for a long time, but I met Audrey Tang, Taiwan’s “digital minister,” and the first transgender official in the cabinet, when she was a software hacker. She is now part of g0v, a civic tech community which pushes for the transition of democracy into the digital age, hacking the system from within by following a transparent governing policy and open source applications. I think these are good signs for the pursuit of democracy.
Pierre-Alexandre Mateos and Charles Teyssou are independent curators based in Paris.