Shu Lea Cheang, LOVER LOVE

LOVER LOVE, a new commission for the Leslie-Lohman Museum of Art by Shu Lea Cheang, begins with a portal. A window is flung open and the gray wall of an apartment block dissolves into a turbulent, overcast sky, against which a smoky being is enveloped by a six-winged seraphim—an angel of the highest order.

This opening transition is both a gesture to Cheang’s longtime collaborator, musician Aérea Negrot (1980–2023), who died by suicide, and a marker of an entry into a hybrid space of documentation and imagination. For this film, presented as a four-channel installation, Cheang worked with eight intergenerational performers in Tucson, Arizona, all of whom contributed their own experiences, narratives, and dreams of and for trans and gender nonconforming life in today’s United States.

This collaboratively scripted film moves between physical and virtual space: between performances in a motel room, a junkyard, and city streets amid surrounding nature, we can see desert plants blooming anthropomorphic appendages and souls escaping inhuman oppression to take transhuman flight.

The gallery’s four screens, themselves portals to the film’s world, can be shifted by viewers into and out of the path of each projector. Each movement triggers a segment of Negrot’s 2011 track “It’s Lover, Love”—a dreamy, minimalist meditation on the lingering traces of broken promises and vanished love. These aural and physical shifts create new compositions, morphing the installation into an active landscape in which to navigate agency, survival, and intimacy in a time of escalating political precarity.

In memory of Aérea Negrot

LOVER LOVE is filmed at Tucson, Arizona, USA with the support of Tuscon Queer Community & Film Tucson

Artists & Performers: Flor de Nopal | Vikó Velázquez Morales, Forrest, Monica Jones, MizSkoden | Emilia Villegas, Nadir | Jade A. Dominguez, Ash Wednesday | Darla Rodriguez, Azrael Fayme, Nimshi Bernicè. Producers: Jazzy Benson | Jazzy Boho, Jürgen Brüning | Jürgen Brüning Film production and Katie Burkholder | & all: collective. Director of Photography: Eryka Dellenbach, Sound Recordist: Melrose Mcclain, Editor: Jörn Hartmann, 3D VFX: Roland Lauth, Gallery installation: Silovsky Studios

LOVER LOVE is made possible, in part, with support by Etant donnés, a program of Albertine Foundation & Villa Albertine, Teiger Foundation, and Thomas VanDyke Gallery.

Curated by Stamatina Gregory, Head Curator / Director of Exhibitions and Collections