Nowadays
Ivan Cheng’s works, which are interested in compression and context, are mostly shown in contemporary art spaces. Working with an interest in making theatrical devices visible and making the audience aware of the space between the material and its interpretation, Nowadays is largely informed by two culturally dispersed narratives, which have also had iterations as successful Broadway musicals – Chicago and Spring Awakening. For Cheng, both have narratives that are propelled by forms of misunderstanding or factual obfuscation. Ivan Cheng’s Nowadays emerges desultory from the artifice abyss of theatre, using historical and staging references to indicate towards the fragmented contemporary, where the notion of the criminal or dissident is still produced and romanticised by techniques of representation.
(he/him), born in 1991 in Sydney, works with genres, languages, and their readings. Interested in the ambient and implicit, his performance work incorporates the site of presentation into a system for formatting text and historical references, often using the video camera as a structuring device. His work was, among others, recently presented at Monash University Museum of Art and the Australian Centre for Moving Image (both in Melbourne). Ivan Cheng is the recipient of The Mondrian Prize 2025.
Credits
Concept, performance, music, light Ivan Cheng Camera Arvo Leo Stage design Leander Costume Good & Bad (Marina M. Kolushova, Victor Stuhlmann, Ossi Lehtonen) Coproduced by Tanzquartier Wien and Shedhalle Zurich
In English