For decades, the work of Shu Lea Cheang has navigated the slipstream between the visible and the coded, the monumental and the transient. Cheang operates at the precarious edge where the rigid architecture of the institution meets the fluid, defiant energy of the margins. From her seminal contributions to net art in the 1990s – which fundamentally reimagined the internet as a site for political subversion – to the sprawling, multi-sensory installations of her contemporary practice in filmmaking and performance, she has remained a defining force.

Long before the art world found its vocabulary for ‘intersectionality’, Cheang was already weaving together technology, queer politics, and social memory with a restless, avant-garde spirit. Her career is a testament to the power of staying marginal while standing firmly at the centre of the world’s most urgent conversations. There is an undeniable bravery in her trajectory: a refusal to be categorised or quieted.

The story of how LOVER LOVE (2026), an interactive, four-channel video installation, came to exist matters as much as the work itself. In 2024, Cheang toured a newly restored print of her 1994 debut feature Fresh Kill across America. At a screening in Tucson, Arizona, she encountered a queer and trans community so vital, so rooted in each other and in the land, that she returned. Eight members of that community would become the film’s beating heart. 30 years after she made a lesbian cyberfeminist thriller about toxic waste and Staten Island, she found herself, in a desert that would crack her work open into something new and necessary. The work that resulted – an interactive video installation of four large screens on movable tracks now filling the Leslie-Lohman Museum – is the most urgent thing I have seen in a New York gallery this year.

What LOVER LOVE asks of you, before it asks anything else, is that you use your hands. The four film screens hang on movable tracks. You push them; you drag trans bodies across frames, fold images into each other, create collisions that nobody planned. Each time you touch a screen, the subwoofers trigger a fragment of Aérea Negrot’s voice – looped from her 2011 song that gives the work its title – pumped through the room at a frequency you feel in your sternum. Cheang has described this mechanism with a precision that has stayed with me: moving the screens, she says, is the audience enacting society’s brutality. But there is a second movement to this idea, one that refuses to end in defeat. Because when you push those screens out of alignment, the images don’t disappear; they spill onto the walls, onto the floor, into corners the projection was never meant to reach. The trans bodies you tried to displace are suddenly everywhere: what was meant to diminish instead proliferates, and the room fills not just with Aérea's voice but with the collective force of bodies that will not be moved. 

This brutality is not abstract. You are standing in a museum rearranging trans bodies with your bare hands, at a moment when the health, safety, and autonomy of those same bodies are under coordinated legislative attack, and the consequence of your movement is immediate and sonic and entirely yours. This is what distinguishes genuinely participatory art from the kind that flatters you with the illusion of agency: real participation makes you responsible. You came to witness, you became the mechanism.

Aérea Negrot – a musician, Cheang’s collaborator across multiple films, trans woman, immigrant, and, since October 2023, sadly no longer with us – is present in every second of this work. Cheang tells me she does not believe Negrot chose to die when she stepped out of a window. In her understanding, Negrot genuinely believed she could fly. This belief is the film’s opening image: a six-winged seraph above the Arizona sky, Negrot elevated into a symbol without being reduced to one. It is a nakedly devotional act of image-making, the kind that art criticism tends to treat with suspicion – too direct, too raw, insufficient ironic distance – and it is precisely the refusal of that distance that gives the image its power. The grief here is structural; it holds the whole work together.

The performers Cheang found in Tucson bring their own extraordinary grammar to the screen. No script was imposed; each was given space for a solo. The results are radically diverse: ritualised BDSM, cactus spine needles drawing blood, a cello performance that ignites the desert; dark, drag personas that resist any fixed reading of self. Cheang told them about Negrot before they began: her music, her success, her immigration, her loneliness, her death. They received this, she told me, with a genuine desire to hold her present tense intact. A banner in the film reads: Aérea is present. The statement is not metaphor or comfort or wishful thinking, but a material condition of the work.

Among the performers is Azrael Fayme, a 17-year-old poet and trans activist who this year was refused treatment for a common cold because the doctors registered their trans identity before their symptoms. In the film, Fayme speaks about dreaming as the first step toward making a new reality; connecting, in Cheang’s framing, to Malcolm X, Arundhati Roy, and the idea of the portal that opens on the other side of catastrophe. In 2026, with gender-affirming care criminalised by executive orders and transition itself a legislative target, the word “dreaming” does not land softly. It lands as an act of refusal. Defiance has found a quieter coat to wear and it turns out that coat is hope, which is more dangerous, covered in cactus glochids.

Cheang told me she wanted to invert the logic of Día de Muertos; not a day of the dead, but a day for the living. What the work offers, against the current political moment’s systematic effort to make trans people invisible, is the opposite of disappearance. Eight people from a desert city, living fully on their own terms, in an environment, projected in a museum where their grief and joy and ritual and fury fill all screens at once. 

LOVER LOVE is at the Leslie-Lohman Museum of Art, New York, until January 3, 2027.