Seecum Cheung is an artist, educator and filmmaker. Her manifold cinematic projects draw an explicit arc progressing from observational documentary toward experiential fiction, blurring the borders of subject, politics, and identity. Each work builds on comprehensive research, expert collaboration, oral history, and personal experience. She redirects the standard categorization of a film director’s or visual artist’s role, making herself physically present through the camera’s lens and incorporating her candid perspective into each complex topic. Attentive consideration, enveloping soundscapes, and evocative editing techniques are some of her empathetic tools to articulate the meaningful agency of individuals.
Cheung's early films 'Interview with Lennart' (2016) and 'The Dutch Window' (2017) candidly illustrated the tactile discouraged humanity of political ideologies. More recently, 'Eviction in Shenzhen' (2019-), 'Ca trù' (2020), and the interactive commission 'I am writing because it's late' (2021) trace the lost, tangled emotional legacy of her ancestors' displacement.
Her evolving focus contends with her estrangement from her formative Western European context and subsequent migration to East and Southeast Asia, cultivating grand epochal narratives that are simultaneously meditative, sombre, and hopeful.
Solo presentations include Grand Union, Birmingham UK; Syndicate, Brussels BE; and Vital Capacities, London UK. She’s participated in exhibitions and screenings at MACRO, Rome IT; Autarkia, Vilnius LT; Syndicate, London UK; Museum Boijmans van Beuningen, Rotterdam NL; DAM Projects, London, UK; Horse and Pony Fine Arts, Berlin DE, and A Tale of a Tub, Rotterdam NL amongst many others.
She is a lecturer in social practice at Willem de Kooning Academie, Rotterdam NL; a professional director of photography in film; and a member of the ESEA artist collective Sunday (fka Rising Buns). She studied at Piet Zwart Institute in Rotterdam.
Seecum Cheung (1984, Coventry UK) lives in Hong Kong, Rotterdam, and London.
Text authored by J.L. Murtaugh, Syndkt Gallery
e: seecumcheung@gmail.com