Shu Lea Cheang: virus as liberation in biopolitical art

Shu Lea Cheang, Taiwanese net-art pioneer and cyberfeminist, discusses her practice of reinventing social mechanisms through sci-fi aesthetics. She received an honorable mention at Prix Ars Electronica for UNBORN 0X9, a project exploring ultrasound politics and ectogenesis. The work evolved from a 2016 residency at EchOpen in Paris, hacking ultrasound technology to make ultrasonic data audible. Cheang founded the collective Future Baby Production after workshops on surrogacy and ectogenesis. Her next step, with Art4Med, is creating a communication interface with the unborn. Cheang's experience of the AIDS epidemic in 1980s New York and the cyberfeminist utopia of the 1990s inform her focus on biopolitics. Her works BRANDON (1997-98) and 3X3X6 (2019) use Bentham's Panopticon to explore gender and sexual segregation, with 3X3X6 incorporating 3D facial recognition at Venice's Palazzo delle Prigioni. Her exhibition Virus Becoming at Musée des Arts Asiatiques in Nice features UKI Virus Rising, imagining humans as viruses reclaiming autonomy from biotech corporations. Cheang's Bionet artifacts, like Petridish and Red Pill, critique pharmacopornographic capitalism. She cites Arundhati Roy's 'The pandemic is a portal' and advocates becoming virus as collective resistance.