Shu Lea Cheang: 3x3x6

Public program
The Failures of Electronic Discipline: A Symposium of Gender and Sexual Outlaws 
May 11, 4–7pm
Psychiatric Hospital Museum of San Servolo (Isola di San Servolo, 30100 Venice, Italy)

Curator: Paul B. Preciado
Promoter and Organizer: Taipei Fine Arts Museum


Taipei Fine Arts Museum will present 3x3x6 as Taiwan’s representation at the 58th Venice Biennale. The exhibition features artist Shu Lea Cheang’s brand-new commissioned project 3x3x6, curated by Paul B. Preciado. Guided tours will be available twice a day during opening hours from May 11–August 27, 2019.

Soon after the World Wide Web was made available for public access in 1990, artist Shu Lea Cheang, armed with her creativity and imagination, embarked on a journey to expand new media beyond known functions of digital communication. She connected virtual networks with spaces in the real world and initiated creative, performative, and action-based projects. Internationally recognized as an Internet art pioneer, Cheang explores the changing relationships between technology and body politics in the age of late capitalism and globalization. 

For Taiwan’s collateral presentation Cheang will create a new work inspired by the history of the exhibition venue, Palazzo delle Prigioni, which first served as a prison in the sixteenth century. The work’s title refers to today’s standardized architecture of industrial imprisonment: a 3 x 3 square-meter cell constantly monitored by 6 cameras. 3x3x6 thus speaks to the realities of the prison, constructed both physically and by the presence of digital surveillance mechanisms.

The exhibition works with 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. The exhibition concept examines how visual and legal hegemonies are constructed over time and how these hegemonies rationalize sex, gender, and race as a result. Through its presentation, 3x3x6 will further explore the alternative forms of nonphysical yet increasingly omnipresent imprisonment in this new digital age, where surveillance apparatus and technologies are becoming inescapable.

A publication with new critical essays by Preciado, Matthew Fuller, Dean Spade, and Jackie Wang on Cheang’s work will complement the exhibition. On May 11, Cheang and Preciado will host the public program “The Failures of Electronic Discipline: A Symposium of Gender and Sexual Outlaws.” Taking place at the historic site of the Psychiatric Hospital Museum on the island of San Servolo, which was until the 1970s an institution of confinement for the so-called mentally ill, the event will involve critics, academics, and writers, including Fuller and Jack Halberstam, as well the performers who embodied the characters of CASANOVA X, SADE X, FOUCAULT X and D X. The event is to become a queer performative encounter of dissidents of the patriarchal and colonial regime, with free admission to all. For more information, please visit: www.taiwaninvenice.org.