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.