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Festival 2025
Steamy Intimacies: A Shu Lea Cheang Special


Expanded
Curated by
april forrest lin 林森, Jeng Au
Running time
180 mins
Expanded

Steamy Intimacies is back! For our third edition, we present a selection of Taiwanese video maverick Shu Lea Cheang’s early films from the 90s and 00s — desirous & slippery, playful & unrestrained. Splash with us as we deep dive into dripping music video caves where moans and beats echo all around, followed by a long night’s unwinding among sweat-soaked comrades, new and old.

A ticket grants you access to the screening, a 60-minute sauna session, and a complimentary snack bag (vegan and gluten-free options available).

Doors open at 18:00, and the film screening will begin at 18:30. We kindly ask ticket holders to arrive on time.


Tickets


2 June 2025, 6:00 PM
Hackney Wick Community Sauna 
Coming Home
1995
Directed by
Shu Lea Cheang
Running time
5 mins
Two women—one white, the other Asian—attempt to fit into a Japanese bathtub. The awkward fitting of bodies into a small space is one of many allegorical scenarios dramatised in a pressing appeal for lesbian rights.  

Sex Fish
1993
Directed by
Shu Lea Cheang
Running time
6 mins
A euphoric lesbian sex video features a group of women in a frenzy of erotic scenes accompanied by poetry, dripping water, fancy goldfish, and an ecstatic score.  

Sex Bowl
1994
Directed by
Shu Lea Cheang
Running time
8 mins
Sport becomes a site for sexual play and celebratory eroticism in this music video-like collage of fetishes.  

Fingers and Kisses
1993
Directed by
Shu Lea Cheang
Running time
5 mins
Cheang takes her camera to the streets for a candid glimpse of lesbian sexuality in public. If Asian women and lesbians both share a certain degree of invisibility in society, the film offers a bold representation of both, but also a challenge to the question “What do lesbians do?”  

LOVEME2030
2005
Directed by
Shu Lea Cheang
Running time
30 mins
LOVEME not now, not here. LOVEME when I depart. Two young LOVEME agents, Natsuo and Hako, are dispatched from Tokyo to Paris to infiltrate Paris’ LOVEME underground in the thick of the night. They make a reservation for a love hotel rendezvous in 2030, deferring all unfinished love stories until the year 2030. &nb...

Curator Biography



april forrest lin 林森 is an interdisciplinary artist and independent curator. They are a member of the programming team at Alchemy Film and Moving Image Festival, and have also curated for Queer East and Otherness Archive. Their programmes have been shown at Barbican Centre, Tate Britain, Wellcome Collection, Institute of Contemporary Arts, and Entre Film Centre.

Content Note



Contains scenes of explicit nudity, unsimulated sex and flashing images