Shu Lea CHEANG was born in Taiwan and immigrated to New York approximately twenty years ago. In 1980, after working in the film industry, she submitted a film to the alternative cable TV network "Paper Tiger TV" and entered the New York art scene.

As can be seen in her approach to TV as media, CHEANG's work has, from the start, focused on delivering messages about contemporary media. Specifically, many of her works turn a sharp and critical eye toward social issues involving the role of the media in racial and gender discrimination. Her work bears an intensity that prevents it from slipping into snobbery or abstraction, as is sometimes the case with socially oriented art, for she makes a concerted effort to participate in the local communities where such issues arise. Furthermore, she actively collaborates with people from many different fields during the process of her artistic production, and her works always transmit a sense of society and the times.

CHEANG has received attention primarily for her short films and videos, a representative work being her 1994 film <<Fresh Kill,>> which critiques the mass media's ethnocentric policies from the standpoint of underground culture. Her installation works include: <<Color Schemes>> (1990), a laundry machine outfitted with a video monitor; <<Those Fluttering Objects of Desire>> (1993), a public telephone with recorded messages of 25 women artists, exhibited at the Whitney Biennial; <<Bowling Alley>>(1995); and <<Elephant Cage/Butterfly Locker>> (1996), produced during her extended stay in Okinawa and Tokyo.

In recent years, following her 1995 <<Bowling Alley,>> a work that includes a discussion held on the Internet and a homepage, CHEANG has shifted the focus of her activities to projects involving the Internet. In this sense, her work in ICC's collection, <<Buy One Get One,>> is of particular interest because as an installation and Internet project it reveals both facets of her artistic style. At present she is working on another Internet piece, <<Brandon Project>>, sponsored by the Guggenheim Museum, SoHo, among others.
For CHEANG, who began her career working in film and TV, the Web provides a more suitable site for her work than the world of fine art or installation art, which is restricted by time and space. The Web, an invisible, virtual, and non-physical medium serves to strengthen her message and is undoubtedly the appropriate community and site for her current endeavors.