Apart from the film's titillating homosexual, transsexual and virtual sex scenes, which subvert male dominance and patriarchy, IKU also portrays the artist's futuristic view of the fusion of the human body with technology as sexualized techno-bodies.
The theme of humans as digital, self-programming and self-upgrading beings recurs in Cheang's recent installation Baby Love in which biotic cloned babies receive, store and transmit human memories and emotions, and K in which human memory is measured in kilobytes that can be traded in a rewritable and loadable format.
Cheang works on a highly
conceptual level for all of her art, the technological complexity of which requires a team of professionals specialized in different fields to construct the finished product, and she challenges the romantic notion of an artist who is the sole creator of his or her art in the digital era.
For Cheang, art is never a form of self-expression: Digital media enable artists to subvert auteurs' authority and welcome the public's active participation in a collective moment on the Internet.
Every participant who shares in the production of Cheang's works is an art practitioner in his or her own right. Eight teams, including Taipei-based SQV Design International (漢邦國際設計), took four months to construct Baby Love, which will soon move to the San Jose Museum in the US.
"For me, working on a large-scale installation work is much like the process of making a film and vice versa. It's all about team work and the division of labor," Cheang said.
The artist has built a network of collaborators in France, German, the UK, Amsterdam and Tokyo who could work with her once a new project comes up. "I seem to have the ability to work well with different talents, and I have to constantly work with new people as old partners gain fame and you know, become expensive. It's a metabolic process," Cheang said.
For her next project, Cheang plans a return to the social and political realms with a plot-driven feature film called Love Me 2030. The project will be shot in different European cities and will examine the issues facing new immigrants and cultural conflicts in the expanding Europe. "I am always intrigued by the phenomenon of cultural remixing, so I guess I'll be staying in Europe for a while," Cheang said. So it seems that our digital nomad has found herself a new home, but for how long? That's a question even the artist herself can't answer.
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