Shu Lea Cheang
1954–
Shu Lea Cheang (b. 1954; Tainan, Taiwan) is an artist and filmmaker who engages in genre-bending, gender-hacking art practices. She frequently uses sci-fi narratives in her film scenarios and artworks and builds interfaces that invite public participation. A net art pioneer, her work BRANDON (1998–99) was the first piece of net art commissioned and collected by the Guggenheim Museum, New York. Cheang represented Taiwan at the 2019 Venice Biennale with her mixed-media installation 3x3x6. Crafting her own genre of sci-fi “New Queer Cinema,” she has made four feature films: FRESH KILL (1994), I.K.U. (2000), FLUIDø (2017), and UKI (2023). In 2024 Cheang received the LG Guggenheim Art and Technology Award. In 2025, her survey exhibition KI$$ KI$$ was shown at Haus der Kunst, Munich; and her theatre performance Hagay Dreaming was presented at Tate Modern, London.
Introduction
Shu Lea Cheang (Chinese: 鄭淑麗; pinyin: Zhèng Shúlì; born April 13, 1954) is a Taiwanese-American artist and filmmaker who lived and worked in New York City in the 1980s and 1990s, until relocating to Europe in 2000. Since the 1980s, as a multimedia and new-media artist, she has navigated topics of ethnic stereotyping, sexual politics, and institutional oppression with her radical experimentations in digital realms.
Over the past decade, she has emerged as a prominent figure in new media art. Cheang is one of the leading multimedia artists dealing with multidisciplinary topics. She is regarded as a pioneering figure in internet-based art, with her multimedia approach at the interface between film, video, internet-based installation, software interaction and durational performance. Her work is often interactive. She is most noted for her individual approach in the realm of art and technology, creatively intermingling social issues with artistic methods.
Cheang's work employs film, video, net-based installation, and interface to explore "...ethnic stereotyping, the nature and excesses of popular media, institutional – and especially governmental – power, race relations, and sexual politics." Cheang has also written and directed the feature films I.K.U. and Fluidø, and directed Fresh Kill.
Wikidata identifier
Q3482619
Information from Wikipedia, made available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike License . Accessed April 18, 2026.
Roles
Artist, installation artist, media artist, photographer, video artist
ULAN identifier
500123007
Names
Shu Lea Cheang
Information from the Getty Research Institute's Union List of Artist Names ® (ULAN), made available under the ODC Attribution License. Accessed April 18, 2026.
Exhibitions & projects
artport
View more on artport, the Whitney Museum's portal to Internet and new media art.