Eugene Yiu Nam Cheung (AU/HK/DE, 1996)
Residency period: January-March 2026
My residency at La Becque has centered on two tasks: the first has been the editing of my debut collection of short stories, which will be published by Nightboat Books in 2027. My second task has been to look into the life and work of the Swiss artist Aloïse Corbaz, a seminal figure of Art Brut. Corbaz, who died in 1964 at the age of 77, remains an enigmatic figure: having spent time in her youth as a governess in the court of Kaiser Wilhelm II, she developed an unrequited romantic interest in him, and upon returning from Germany to Switzerland due to the outbreak of World War I, she experienced what we might term a “psychic break”—she was diagnosed with schizophrenia and subsequently spent the remainder of her life in a psychiatric institution in Gimel, a municipality close to at La Becque.
A predominant, if not problematic art historical reading is that Corbaz’s depictions of aristocratic women fawning over an iterative “Kaiser-figure” are stylisations of her schizophrenia; suggesting that her mental illness and the power of her work, flows, very simply, out of unreturned longing. At La Becque, I have been developing a short story which seeks to reinterpret Corbaz; not as an artist overdetermined by feminine lust, but, instead, as an artist with a want to undermine the ruling classes: that is, her drawings being indexical not of admiration, but as blueprints for revenge. — Eugene Yiu Nam Cheung
Based in Berlin, Eugene Yiu Nam Cheung (Australia/Hong Kong/Germany) is a writer, cultural worker, and the founding editor of Decolonial Hacker, a platform that critically engages cultural institutions and histories through commissioned interventions. His practice is informed by anarchist and dissident publication strategies, utopian thresholds in language, and literary expressions of revolutionary consciousness.
Eugene Yiu Nam Cheung, La Becque, 2026, photo Aurélien Haslebacher