Artist who made famous work on trans man murder 20 years ago will represent Taiwan at Venice Biennale

Cheang Shu Lea, the 64-year-old artist who made the 2001 ‘sci-fi porn’ film I. K. U, will use the world’s biggest art show to revisit themes from her groundbreaking piece ‘Brandon’

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Brandon (1998-99) by Cheang Shu Lea in installation form at the The Guggenheim museum in New York. Photo: Courtesy of Cheang Shu Lea

Published: 1:45pm, 21 Jul 2018Updated: 2:29pm, 21 Jul 2018

Cheang Shu Lea’s Brandon (1998-99) was a groundbreaking piece of early internet multimedia art that took a maverick approach to exploring the 1993 rape and murder of Brandon Teena, the young American transgender man who was the subject of the 1999 film Boys Don’t Cry.

When the Guggenheim museum restored the work in April last year, it kept all of its period features such as its text-heavy, MS-DOS-style interfaces, visible frames, limited interactivity and first-generation morphing GIFs.

The old-school look – an aberration in this age of slick web templates – enhances, not diminishes, the work’s transgressive appeal. Its rabbit hole of chance encounters, Gothic horror, 1990s BDSM imagery and that greatest symbol of personal freedom – the American road trip – is as irresistible now as it was when it was created.

But what would Brandon look like if Cheang had made it today, with issues of sexuality and the public invasion of private space more relevant than ever?

We can find out next year.

Cheang, who was born in Taiwan, was picked last week to represent the island at the 2019 Venice Biennale. She will use the world’s biggest art show to revisit some of Brandon’s themes exactly 20 years after the release of the original artwork.

Taiwanese artist Cheang Shu Lea. Photo: Jackie Baier

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