Shu Lea Cheang is the winner of the 2024 LG Guggenheim Award. The Taiwanese-American interdisciplinary net artist and filmmaker was selected by a jury in recognition of her prescient exploration of emerging technologies and their broader societal implications.
Born in 1954, Cheang has variously made use of code, gaming engines and software design in her multifaceted projects for more than three decades, in addition to alternative currencies and machine learning. She represented Taiwan at the 2019 Venice Biennale.
This year’s jury was comprised of Eungie Joo, Curator and Head of Contemporary Art at San Francisco Museum of Modern Art; Koyo Kouoh, Executive Director and Chief Curator of Zeitz Museum of Contemporary Art, Cape Town; Noam Segal, LG Electronics Associate Curator, Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, New York; Carolyn Christov-Bakargiev, Director of Castello di Rivoli Museo d’Arte Contemporanea, Turin; and Stephanie Dinkins, artist, the inaugural recipient of the LG Guggenheim Award.
The jury said in a statement: ‘Shu Lea Cheang’s oeuvre was exceptional among outstanding nominees. Her dynamic works present bursting energy, mesmerizing color palettes, and highly complex, playful, and aesthetically pleasing installations. In those, she renders the porousness between the physical and digital domains, offering empowering amalgamations for audiences to engage with.’
The LG Guggenheim Art and Technology Initiative is a five-year collaboration designed to research, honour and promote artists working at the intersection of art and technology. Cheang will receive an unrestricted honorarium of $100,000 in celebration of her achievements in this field.
