$10 SPECIAL EVENT
FILMMAKER IN PERSON
FRIDAY, AUGUST 14—7 PM
FLUIDØ
Dir. Shu Lea Cheang, 2017
Germany. 80 min.
In English.
FISTING CLUB 1
Dir. Shu Lea Cheang, 2018
Germany. 10 min.
In English
FISTING CLUB 2
Dir. Shu Lea Cheang, 2025
Germany. 20 min.
In English.
New York Premiere!
Presented in collaboration with the Leslie-Lohman Museum of Art.
Shu Lea Cheang’s new work LOVER LOVE, a commission by the Leslie-Lohman Museum of Art, has taken up residency in the museum since April. The mammoth work is both highly immersive and highly interactive; moveable screens serve as portals into Shu Lea Cheang’s unmistakable transhumanist worldview. The digital and physical collide in a blooming dream of gender non-conforming utopia. On the occasion of Cheang’s visit to New York this August, Spectacle is thrilled to welcome the artist (whose IKU was a midnight favorite at the theater in 2017) for a one-of-a-kind presentation of cyberpunk queer futures.
The evening begins with Cheang’s glitchy conspiracy thriller FLUIDø, set in a future where the mutated AIDS virus has given birth to a new breed of human whose cum is a highly addictive supernarcotic. “When Shu Lea Cheang’s Fluidø first came out in 2017,” bodyhacking gender theorist Paul Preciado wrote in 2021, “it was meant to be a queer cypherpunk science-fiction film. Now, in the era of global confinement, digital sexuality, and sanitary surveillance, it has become the archeology of our present.”
The feature is paired with the two episodes of Shu Lea Cheang’s (highly explicit) series FISTING CLUB, a self-explanatory (“if this is your first Fisting Club, you have to fist.”) and riotous expression of collective emancipation.
Image in banner courtesy of J. Jackie Baier. Special thanks to Dylan Gamboa, the Leslie-Lohman Museum of Art, and Shu Lea Cheang.