Ahead of a live performance, an audience might be warned about strobe lights, loud noises, or triggering content. For 16, Ivan Cheng’s site-specific intervention for the second edition of AIR, the Aspen Art Museum is offering some less traditional safety recommendations: wear closed-toe shoes, watch out for hazardous material, and request PPE for good measure. The reason for all this caution? The work is being staged in an active landfill.
16, which will take place on July 29, follows in the tradition of the Australian-born, medium-agnostic artist’s “live situations for camera”; the performance will be filmed in real time, the resulting video becoming the foundation of a future artwork. This temporal collapse and affinity for remixing and recirculating his own IP are at the core of Cheng’s intrepid practice, which has been the focus of shows in Luxembourg, London, Vienna, and Zurich just this past year. AIR is a rare occasion to see his work in action on this side of the Atlantic—his last solo exhibition stateside was in 2021.
Before he jetted off to Aspen, CULTURED caught up with Cheng in his studio in Amsterdam, where he’s also run the project space bologna.cc since 2017.
What’s in your studio fridge?
Nothing I’m proud of. Studio fridge equals apartment fridge equals project space fridge. It’s barren of desire, only remnant crap. While there are moments that I go to a chic delicatessen and think this is a cool cheese, I tend to eat what I get. Some might even say passing by the shop is part of my ritual for the studio, just not one that is a consistent chime in the day. Lately there was a special on my favorite brand of frozen dumplings (2 for 10€), so I stocked up. It’s there beside old ice. To be honest, sometimes I feel like I’m trying to delete my corporeality through my work (in the studio). There’s also invariably scraps of beer, liquor, cola, coconut water, takeaways that artists I’m working with leave here.
If your studio were an animal, what would it be?
A happy donut or a minion. I think I’m unfortunately very distant from anything natural.
Do you work with any assistants, or do you work alone?
I work alone with no romance, only delusions. But I make structures so that collaborators can come in to help. I think I’m afraid of enacting centralized power, which might seem odd, since the performance parts of my work consistently stage an aggressive seizure of it.
Any rituals to prepare for a studio visit?
Reply to all emails. Do my Duolingo for dopamine. Steep a teabag in boiling water. Favorite a few things online that I’ll never buy. Read reviews of prosumer cameras. Toggle the VPN on and off. Text my friends. Listen to music. Basically satisfy most banality of “contemporary” life so I don’t have to be “contemporary” in my answers, and rather throw myself towards the future.
What book changed the way you think about art?
Things I haven’t read in ages, probably… Ban en Banlieue by Bhanu Kapil. Bernadette Corporation: 2000 Wasted Years. Paper Exhibition by Raimundas Malašauskas. Cookie! by Jan Verwoert. I maybe am just a product of my past hunger, wondering now when the last revelatory moment I had was…
What’s the best piece of advice you’ve ever received from another artist?
Tell students how crazy it is that, while they are enrolled they deserve your care and patience, but upon completion they are existing in the same market as you. They are your competition. It’s an attention economy and the trick will be to do what you do without making your practice an industrial complex. I found this monstrous, but it helped me nuance moments of my life that I fantasize as hobbies, passions, and jobs, while they’re all kind of the same thing.
If you could have a studio visit with one artist, dead or alive, who would it be?
Selena Gomez. She seems so down to earth and has wonderful taste. She might ask questions I find irrelevant, but then I’d wonder what I categorize as “irrelevant.” Or Ethel Cain.
When was the last time you felt jealous of another artist?
Ten years ago. I learned better since then. There’s little to be jealous of in artists; you should be jealous of people who have unconditional love, even if you’re uninterested in that.
Is there a studio rule you live by?
“You probably can’t get what you want, so why did you want it in the first place?” followed by, “What produces attention, and what are its substitutions?”
Have you ever destroyed a work to make something new?
I arguably destroy work constantly by my method of documentation; performances I present are filmed, provisionally, to my specifications, and then edited by myself into something that is distributed as the video of that work. This is similar to the selfies and videos you take while on that special vacation that actually reshape, if not decimate, your experience of that time. But then, I remember learning when I was young that every line that’s ever formed in space can be considered as a type of extinction. Whether it’s new is another question.
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