ArtForum
Date: July 12, 2018

The Taipei Fine Arts Museum announced that artist Shu Lea Cheang has been chosen to represent Taiwan at the Fifty-Eighth Venice Biennale, which will take place in May 2019. She is the first woman to exhibit in Taiwan’s pavilion since it began holding single-artist presentations.

“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,” Ping Lin, director of the Taipei Fine Arts Museum, said in a statement. “For this reason, the nominating committee employed a greater level of strategic thinking, coloring their artist recommendations with stronger overtones of global strategy. Shu Lea Cheang, a pioneer of net art, not only in Taiwan but around the world, emerged as the first choice.”

Best known for her net art installations, films, and art actions, which rethink the middle ground between technology and humanity, Cheang considers herself a “digital nomad.” While Cheang was born in Taiwan in 1954, she launched her career as an artist while living in New York in the 1980s. She has also lived and worked in Japan, Holland, the United Kingdom, and France.

A cofounder of Kingdom of Piracy, an online work space that promotes the free sharing of digital content and ideas as an art form, Cheang often reimagines how the internet can be used in service of art and utilizes technology to break down barriers surrounding assumptions about gender and sexuality.     [FULL  STORY]