Born in Taiwan in 1954, Shu Lea Cheang has lived and worked in the United States as well as Japan, Holland, the United Kingdom, and France. Her practice combines artistic concerns with hot-button social issues, defined by her peripatetic and information-era existence. She has been a member of the alternative media collective Paper Tiger Television since 1982 and produced public-access programs for the group addressing racism in the media. In 2001 she cofounded Kingdom of Piracy, an online work space that promotes the free sharing of digital content and ideas as an art form; this project and others are borne of her political and community-driven goals. As an artist, she has worked in a variety of mediums—film, video, installation, web spaces—her output as varied as cyberspace itself.
For Making News/Making History: Live from Tiananmen Square (1990), a commission for the American Film Institute (AFI) Video Festival, Cheang interviewed protesters and soldiers during the days of student demonstrations and marches, juxtaposing their words with official statements and concurrent reporting by China Central Television. Exhibited at the AFI in Los Angeles as well as the International Center for Photography, New York, that year, she combined the sources into a five-channel installation, contrasting witness accounts with official, politically approved media releases. Her best-known work came as a reaction to tightening social mores in America during the late-1980s and early-1990s culture wars. In 1994, her feature film Fresh Kill—which touchs on issues of gay rights, environmentalism, and government intrusion in a surreal family-driven narrative—was screened at the Berlin Film Festival, as well as at the 1995 Whitney Biennial, New York. In 1995, the Walker Art Center, Minneapolis, acquired her work Bowling Alley (1995), the first cybernetic art installation. The commission linked the Walker's galleries with a local bowling alley via the web, highlighting the communication and exchanges happening at both locations.
Later in her career, Cheang's focus shifted to deconstructing the economic machinations of the Internet: its virtual and real exchanges of commodities driven by profit, power, and desire. Garlic=Rich Air, a 2002 partnership with Creative Time, New York, used a multimedia cyberinstallation to engage a community in the bartering and exchange of garlic in place of contemporary currency. At the 2003 Los Angeles Gay and Lesbian Film Festival (Outfest), she led Platinum SnapMeat, an interactive, real-time sex auction. In 2007, the Sundance Film Festival commissioned MobiOpera, "collective public cinema" recorded and uploaded by festivalgoers at their discretion, which culminated in a coscripted, codirected "soapisode" uniting the authors through technology. An American citizen, the artist lives and works primarily in Paris.