Eugene Yiu Nam Cheung (AU/HK/DE, 1996)
Residency period: January-March 2026
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.
His work has featured in e-flux Criticism, Third Text, ArtReview, Griffith Review, and Art+Australia. Recipient of the International Award for Art Criticism (2021) and the Dal Stivens Literary Award (2025), he is currently preparing his debut short story collection with Nightboat Books. He has curated exhibitions and public programs for institutions including Whitechapel Gallery (London), Julia Stoschek Foundation (Berlin), documenta fifteen (Kassel), Rockbund Art Museum (Shanghai), and transmediale (Berlin), and teaches critical theory and curatorial practice at the Design Academy Eindhoven.
During his residency at La Becque, Eugene Yiu Nam Cheung will research and draft a creative text exploring how the literary form of institutional critique can be extended through fiction. Drawing from analytical historiography, decolonial literature, and revolutionary publishing, he will examine the potential of short stories as vessels for rethinking institutional narratives. His project reimagines the life of Swiss artist Aloïse Corbaz, who spent 46 years in psychiatric asylums, through a counter-narrative in which an anthropomorphized sparrow, echoing the rhetoric of Germany’s Socialist Patients’ Collective (SPK), urges her to rebel against psychiatry and take revenge on European nobility.
Eugene Yiu Nam Cheung, photo Agustín Farias