Ivan Cheng: Confidences / Baseline
Confidences / Baseline plays with the vampire novel like a dollhouse. Characters who variously believe in the power of theatre and performance become entangled with grief, desire, and the unknown. What does a rehearsal come to mean when a vampire lives forever?
Baseline is the first in a series of books that fetishise nightclubs for their inaccessibility. Deluded realities anticipate the transformative sensuality of penetration. In his second novel, artist Ivan Cheng maintains his fixation on structures for audiences between public and private.
About Ivan Cheng: the performances of Ivan Cheng are incomplete, failing, desperate, and riddled with absence. They use his variously trained performing body, incanting texts that foreground subjectivity in monologues and dialogues. Identities of other interlocutors become embedded through rehearsal, dialogue, and entrustment. Without deluded presupposition of being for everyone, Cheng’s practice is invested in questions around publics and accessibility. In 2020, he reconstituted past performance texts into a murder mystery about a street busker, and continues his foray into written genre with Confidences / Baseline.
Book front cover image by Özgür Kar, back cover by Nikola Lamburov
