As Taiwan’s representation at the Venice Art Biennale 2019, Taipei Fine Arts Museum presents the project 3x3x6 by the artist Shu Lea Cheang. Curated by Paul B. Preciado, the brand-new site-specific work is inspired by the history of the exhibition venue, Palazzo delle Prigioni near Piazza San Marco, which first served as a prison in the sixteenth century.
The title of the project, 3x3x6, refers to today’s standardized architecture of industrial imprisonment: a 3 x 3 square-meter cell constantly monitored by 6 cameras. The exhibition investigates the interrelations between surveillance techniques (from the 18th Century panopticon to modern versions by the means of facial recognition, AI, Internet) and the punishment related to sexual and gender preferences. Ten films present ten historical and contemporary case studies of individuals who have been outcasted or incarcerated due to reasons of gender variance, sexual preference, or racial differences.
This video provides you with an exhibition walkthrough and interviews with artist Shu Lea Cheang and curator Paul B. Preciado.
Shu Lea Cheang: 3x3x6. Taiwan in Venice 2019. Collateral Event of the 58th International Art Exhibition, La Biennale di Venezia. Palazzo delle Prigioni, May 9, 2019.
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Shu Lea Cheang is an artist and filmmaker working with various art mediums and film formats, including installation, performance, net art, public art, video installation, feature-length film, and mobile web series. Her artistic pursuits demonstrate an imagination and the desire to cross the boundaries of society, geography, politics, and economic structures, thus redefining genders, roles, mechanisms, etc. As a net art pioneer, her BRANDON (1998–99) was the first web artwork commissioned and collected by the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum in New York. From homesteading cyberspace in the 1990s to her retreat to the post-netcrash BioNet zone, Cheang takes on viral love and bio hacks in her current cycle of works, including UKI (2009–ongoing) and UNBORN0x9 (2019).
Paul B. Preciado is a writer, philosopher, curator, and one of the leading thinkers in the study of gender and sexual politics. An honors graduate and Fulbright fellow, he earned a MA in Philosophy and Gender Theory at the New School for Social Research in New York and a PhD in Philosophy and Theory of Architecture from Princeton University. From 2014 to 2017 he was Curator of Public Programs of documenta 14 (Athens and Kassel). Preciado is the author of Countersexual Manifesto (Columbia University Press, repr., 2018), Pornotopia (Zone Books, 2014) for which he was awarded the Prix Sade in France, and Testo Junkie: Sex, Drugs and Biopolitics in the Pharmacopornographic Era (Feminist Press, 2013). His latest book is titled An Apartment on Uranus (Grasset / Anagrama, 2019). Preciado is currently Associate Philosopher of the Centre Georges Pompidou, Paris.
Taipei Fine Arts Museum
Founded in 1983, Taipei Fine Arts Museum (TFAM) is Taiwan’s first museum of modern and contemporary art; it is also among one of the first in Asia. Venturing into its 35th year, TFAM has dedicated itself to the development of modern art in Taiwan while keeping abreast of ongoing trends in contemporary art. It has pioneered the biennial trends of the region and overseen the operations of the Taipei Biennial since 1998, as well as the planning of Taiwan’s representation as a collateral event at the Venice Biennale since 1995. In recent years, Taiwanese artists and art institutions have elevated their participation in the global art community, generating a more refined and complex network of connections. For this reason, the nominating committee has employed a higher level of strategic thinking, coloring their artist recommendations with stronger overtones of global strategy.
