Warning visitors that Cheang’s video works “contain explicit sexual material, nudity, and strobe effects” as they leave the premises makes this gallery the champion of understatement and misrepresentation. The Taiwanese activist Cheang may be a pioneer of ‘alternative’ and ‘queer’ cinema who warrants a PhD thesis on post-punk, post-AIDS, or an altogether post-sex future. But even a brief sample of this screening programme reveals that, above all, she is a pornographer. The gallery’s darkened screening room offers the passer-by relief through hardcore sex which he would otherwise need to search for online with keywords like ‘vintage’, ‘Asian’, and ‘fantasy’. 

The gallery’s verbose text hits the queer theory tropes but does little to explain how the straight couples fucking on screen contribute to anyone’s liberation. It does even less to encourage in-depth scrutiny of the over four hours of material in the exhibition. With content this gratuitously explicit and a curator so absent, it’s a miracle that this project wasn’t shut down by the licencing, or indeed art-historical authorities.