Taiwan Pavilion at Venice Biennale Explores Surveillance and Desire

The Taiwan Pavilion at the 2019 Venice Art Biennale, curated by philosopher Paul B. Preciado and featuring artist Shu Lea Cheang, presents "3x3x6," a site-specific installation at Palazzo delle Prigioni in Piazza San Marco, a former prison that once held Giacomo Casanova. Cheang, a pioneer of net art whose work "Brandon" (1998-99) was the first net art commissioned by the Guggenheim Museum New York, explores themes of gender, surveillance, and desire. The installation features ten historical and contemporary figures imprisoned for sexual or gender-related offenses, including the Marquis de Sade, Michel Foucault, Chinese teenagers arrested for posting obscene material online, and female gangs from Zimbabwe. Their identities are blurred through digital facial and body recognition systems, transforming them into data that disappears like ashes. The exhibition includes a panopticon-like space where visitors are monitored by cameras, a room with ten punk-style short films reinterpreting the prisoners' stories, and a final room with a transparent monolith of computers and electronics inspired by Hugh Hefner's Playboy Mansion control room, linking surveillance and desire as tools of social control.