203March 6, 2024
Taiwanese American French interdisciplinary net artist and filmmaker Shu Lea Cheang has been announced as the winner of the second LG Guggenheim Award. Established last year by New York’s Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum and South Korean tech company LG as part of the LG Guggenheim Art and Technology Initiative, a five-year program aimed at discovering and assisting artists working at the intersection of art and technology, the honor is attended by an unrestricted $100,000 award, to be used as the winner sees fit.
“Shu Lea Cheang was one of the first to recognize the liberatory potential of the digital realm,” said Guggenheim deputy director and chief curator Naomi Beckwith in a statement. “We celebrate her bold explorations of bodies, and their desires, in our digital and analog worlds, and are thrilled, alongside LG, to recognize her necessary work.”
Born in Taiwan in 1954, Cheang for the past thirty years has operated at the vanguard of internet art, with work variously incorporating software, code, gaming engines, machine learning, and alternative currencies. Among her pathbreaking works are Locker Baby Project, 2001–12, which centers the concept of clone babies as an intelligent industry; Garlic=Rich Air, 2002–, which posits garlic as currency; and the 2017 sci-fi film Fluidø, which presents a world in which HIV/AIDS has been eradicated, but in some people has mutated into a gene that can be extracted to make a highly sought-after psychoactive drug, leading to human trafficking of the gene’s carriers. Cheang represented Taiwan at the 2019 Venice Biennale, where she presented the mixed-media installation 3x3x6, which queried the formation of sexual and gender norms.
This year’s prize jury was composed of Eungie Joo, curator and head of contemporary art at the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art; Koyo Kouoh, executive director and chief curator of the Zeitz Museum of Contemporary Art, Cape Town; Noam Segal, LG Electronics Associate Curator at the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, New York; Carolyn Christov-Bakargiev, director of Turin’s Castello di Rivoli Museo d’Arte Contemporanea; and artist Stephanie Dinkins, the inaugural recipient of the award.
“Shu Lea Cheang’s oeuvre was exceptional among outstanding nominees. Her dynamic works present bursting energy, mesmerizing color palettes, and highly complex, playful, and aesthetically pleasing installations. In those, she renders the porousness between the physical and digital domains, offering empowering amalgamations for audiences to engage with,” said the jury in a collective statement. “She continuously offers new understandings of technological changes and their effects on our societies and her expansive output is, and will remain, highly influential for generations.”