Ivan Cheng
16

Ivan Cheng presented a new site-specific performance for AIR 2026. Conceived as one of his emblematic “live situations for camera” in which the artist is continuously filmed in real time, the work staged a feedback loop between action and documentation, where gestures, speech, and incidental encounters were immediately translated into image. As in much of Cheng’s practice, the act of filming actively structured the performance more than simply recording it, producing a work that existed simultaneously as live event and circulating document.

Working across performance, video, and installation, Cheng has long developed scenarios that test how behavior is shaped under conditions of observation, choreography, and circulation. In recent years, he has been actively compressing and mixing these past video registrations of performances for his exhibitions, recently with Hard Drive 1 (Nicoletta Fiorucci Foundation, 2025) and Hard Drive 2 (MUDAM Luxembourg, 2026). Across multiple screens, the subtitled and seductive videos form a ribbon that scrolls back and forth, sometimes giving up to ten channels of sound flattened into a stereo image, a total omission of sound, or providing only the audio of one of the screens. As in his live situations, Cheng produces and heavily suggests a proposal for audience focus, similar to how a social media feed might offer its idiosyncrasies of looping, hooks for attention, and dull ambient noise.

Cheng masquerades as a performance artist with a structural approach, deliberately using the tricks of theatrical address to deliver tightly scripted monologues glued together by improvised banter that breaks the fourth wall. He insists on the presence of a camera operator, almost like a choreographic tool to introduce a second-order address, splitting attention between the live audience and its mediated future one. The live audience might also have its own devices for recording, and its own reasons for doing so. Cheng’s work is confidently open to the ambiguity of where the frame might end, and in its suggestion of accumulating an archive, prepares for the digital junkyard of the future.

Ivan Cheng is an artist working across genres, languages, and their systems of interpretation. His performance work incorporates the site of presentation as part of a system for formatting text and historical reference, often using the video camera as a structuring device. Across performance, writing, video, sound, and installation, his work is shaped by collaboration, letting transactions and encounters inform both method and material. Cheng has recently presented solo exhibitions and performances at institutions including MUDAM Luxembourg (2026); Nicoletta Fiorucci Foundation, London (2025); Tanzquartier Wien, Vienna (2025); Shedhalle, Zurich (2025); Monash University Museum of Art, Naarm/Melbourne (2024); and Lafayette Anticipations, Paris (2023). He founded the project space bologna.cc in Amsterdam in 2017.

Curated by Daniel Merritt, Chief Curator, and Stella Bottai, Senior Curator-at-Large, with Gemma Goette, Curatorial Assistant.

Written and developed by Ivan Cheng, with camera by Arvo Leo; garments by Good & Bad (Marina M. Kolushova, Victor Stuhlmann, and Ossi Lehtonen); creative production by Raul Altamura-Zbengheci; and technical direction by Ryan Jenkins.

Supported by the Nicoletta Fiorucci Foundation.

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Photo: Ivan Cheng, 16, 2026. Production still from AIR 2026: Figures in a Landscape, Aspen, Colorado. Garments: Good & Bad. Camera: Arvo Leo, Will Sardinsky. Photo: Maria Baranova. Courtesy the artist and Aspen Art Museum