LOVER LOVE , a new commission for the Leslie-Lohman Museum of Art by Shu Lea Cheang (b. 1954), 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 our 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.
Shu Lea Cheang