CURA.

He wore a sheer blue catsuit and magenta leather pants, running, dancing and haranguing amused and surprised visitors, mimicking the eerie simplicity of an election rally. On the panoramic terrace of Villa Imperiale, a Renaissance complex in the hills of Pesaro, Ivan Cheng had gathered a captive audience for his performance Oil Rig Elision (tempesta d’amore) (2023). Produced by INCURVA for Against Sun and Dust, it was the public culmination of months of dialogue where we worked together, and followed a few days of privately filming other scenes through the building with camera team No Text Azienda.

Live, he coaxes his crowd, while local performer Patrizia Inzaghi dances distantly in the depths of the gardens. Closest to Cheng were two video cameras mounted onto an improvised stereoscopic rig. Meanwhile, obedient visitors shout suggested slogans, heightening the slight sense of absurdity triggered by the contrast between idyll and comedy.

Cheng at times makes the work accessible by allowing the audience to approach, then evade into the distance of architectural and cultural levels. The relation between memory and identity then undergoes a crisis that involves the characters who have developed into archetypes, as if it were a soap opera. Cheng’s subjectivity is diluted by his turning into a Jesuit, virgin and ocean, while the boundary between public, performer and technician fades away. He declares that the Villa is an oil rig; a metaphor for historical extraction, naming the work after the Italian title for a German soap opera. His performed text, composed of monologues split between two speakers, also paraphrases material like Taylor Swift and John Ashbery to allude to characters not present in the scene.

The duality of lenses and the evocation of an evil twin refer back to the trope of binary oppositions, formalized for example in GEMINI EXIT (Beeny’s Retirement) (2019). In this situation for camera, the public were invited to use their devices to transmit text and audio that offered an alternative sonic proximity to the live action.

While steady over time, Cheng’s preoccupations evolve in relation to the social, technological, and political context, for which he has an acute sensitivity. If in the post-COVID period his experimentation was focused on the medium, almost overshadowing the content, today the pressing relationship with the need to verify information is no longer something to be neglected.

He inclines to merge performance and infrastructure, by introjecting organizational logic, communication strategies, and conversations with vendors and non-professionals, who often enter the piece. He thus orchestrates symbolic games by casting people in roles, relating to the biographical and contextual histories of performers and operators.

Humor stems from the dizzying accumulation of actions that result in an uncontrollable, fallible and seductive flux. This arises from the coexistence of centralization and loss of control, discipline and dissipation, as a surprisingly liberating invasion of life into one’s practice.

Real or imagined, the expectations of institutions and the public enter into his syntax. Cheng tends to fulfill and dismantle them both at once.

With imploring and defiant stares, he never stopped asking “is this good enough for you?” as in Ouija DM (2020) by cosplaying Beethoven and breaking rhythm and tone. In Oil Rig Elision (tempesta d’amore), he repeatedly pleaded “tell me I’m pure,” changing different registers and poses, betraying new ethical preoccupations. These invest the mediation and communication system of his work, which implies a responsibility not to distort the meaning of situations. Yet it is also through misunderstandings that one reaches deeply into his work.

For April 2025, at Shedhalle Zurich, Ivan Cheng is working on Nowadays, co-produced with Tanzquartier Wien, where his obsession with prisons leads him to replace the theatrical black box with Da Vinci Code, an environment of cardboard prison bars arranged in a golden spiral, which becomes a proxy for the fourth wall between performer and audience.

Referencing the musical Chicago (2002) and the play Spring Awakening (1891), Nowadays introduces the logic of religious conspiracy as it relates to media distortions that romanticize notions of crime and dissent.

For The Mondrian Initiative, Cheng will work for nine months starting in April 2025, joined by an extended network of artists and collaborators, in a cluster of cottages in between Laren and Blaricum in the Netherlands, where a community of artists, including Piet Mondrian, worked in the early decades of the twentieth century. Cheng’s winning proposal was for a project with the working title Deposition / L’Éphémère est eternel, a reference to the 1926 work of ‘anti-theater’ of the same name by Belgian artist and writer Michel Seuphor. Upon reading his script, Piet Mondrian had been inspired to develop a maquette of a set design, which was photographed but never realized. Working with local non-professional performers, Cheng will introduce the figure of Gertrude Stein, testing types of performance virtually inherent in the different readings of texts, individual or collective, silent or declaimed.

He progresses by accumulation, in dissonance with neo-plasticist reduction, lightly probing the desire to re-enact a situation of communion lost in history, with its imagined expectations and pleasures, as had been the case with Oil Rig Elision. What is at stake, in both cases, is not the assertion of a thesis, but the possibility of presenting alternative readings, while attempting to remain surprised by encounters and audiences.

Cheng’s practice is evolving in relation to an audience that has, in the last decade, developed a heightened confidence in their relationship with the camera, and the increased accessibility of tools for creation and contextualization, in music, film, comedy, and dance. These changes create new interactions with performance, leading to layered forms of participation.

Cheng synthesizes relationships to authenticity from experimental theater and film with the feigned ingenuity conveyed by social networks, and with the awareness of the dangerous political implications of the disguise of the subjects who shape them. At the same time, he disorients the opposition between illusion and disillusionment, questioning social clichés based on the assumption of the superiority of skepticism over confidence. New political preoccupations thus emerge, investing contemporary technological scenarios, which Cheng prefers to challenge through the boundless sophistication of conspiracy, rather than accept its disturbing banality. He draws new ways of reckoning with the public dimension that inevitably invests the performative act, and his person at this stage of his life, in which trust and suspicion dissolve.