SHU LEA CHEANG: LOVER LOVE at Leslie-Lohman Museum of Art

SHU LEA CHEANG: LOVER LOVE
Apr 03, 2026 – Jan 03, 2027

In this commission for LLMA, Shu Lea Cheang presents a four-channel video installation.

This new work gestures to Cheang’s longtime collaborator, musician Aérea Negrot, who died by suicide in 2023, and hybridizes documentation and imagination. To make the film, Cheang worked with eight intergenerational performers in Tucson, Arizona, all of whom contributed their own experiences, narratives, and dreams of and for trans and gender nonconforming life in today’s United States.

Shu Lea Cheang (b. 1954, Taiwan) is a pioneering multimedia artist and filmmaker whose work spans video and film, net-based installations, and networked performance. Since the 1980s, her artistic concerns have addressed critical social issues in a practice defined by her peripatetic, information-era existence. Between 1994 and 2003, she produced four feature films in the genre she calls Scifi New Queer Cinema. Her debut feature Fresh Kill (1994), a cyberfeminist eco-thriller, premiered at the Berlin International Film Festival: in 2024, she toured a restored 35mm print across the US in 21 independent cinemas. Brandon (1998-1999), the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum’s first web art commission, explored gender fusion and techno-body entanglement. In 2019, she represented Taiwan at the Fifty-Eighth Venice Biennale with the installation 3x3x6, which explored how surveillance apparatuses enforce hegemonies of race, sex, and gender. In 2024, Cheang received the LG Guggenheim Award, honoring her work at the intersection of art and technology. In 2025, she had her first institutional survey exhibition Ki$$ Ki$$ at Haus der Kunst, Munich. Her venture into theater direction, Hagay Dreaming (2020-2026), premiered at Tate Modern, London in 2025 and will be staged at Taipei Performing Arts Center in May 2026. After living for two decades in New York City, Cheang relocated to Europe in 2000 and currently lives and works in Paris.