Fresh Kill: Fluid Transmission

To understand Fresh Kill, we must understand the specific cultural milieu from which it emerged. Downtown New York in the early nineties was a crucible of experimental art, LGBTQ+ activism, anti-globalization consciousness, and early digital-network culture. Computers were connected in what was still a pre-browser global network, where bulletin-board systems hummed with chatter from activists sharing strategies long before online social platforms existed. The city’s public-access cable television was a contested space where artists and activists seized airtime as a way to dismantle corporate media. Collectives like Paper Tiger Television exposed how power operated through images by dissecting news graphics with hand-drawn diagrams and photocopied texts. Deep Dish TV used satellite broadcasts to assemble grassroots programming on topics like AIDS and the Gulf War, stitched together from VHS tapes and material shot in community studios and living rooms. It was an ecosystem defined by urgency, rooted in the belief that access to transmission was itself an important goal of political struggle. Cheang, who had migrated to New York from Taiwan in the late seventies and earned a master’s degree in cinema studies from New York University, quickly embedded herself in this culture of counterbroadcasting at both Paper Tiger and Deep Dish, where the question of who controlled media was inseparable from that of how power operated.

The alternate version of early-nineties New York that Cheang shows us in Fresh Kill has accelerated into dystopia: Staten Island’s shorelines are clogged with industrial runoff, and animals glow an unnatural radioactive green. Domestic interiors are realistically warm and cluttered, like any small family apartment, yet they are constantly disrupted by flickering screens. Advertisements intrude throughout: for Sea Wonder canned fish, an activist ranting about the “big boys of City Hall,” a sex toy introduced alongside Saran-Wrapped vegetables, a lightbulb as bright as an atomic bomb. A looping PSA from the GLOBEX corporation features a suited man with arms outstretched, a levitating Earth suspended between his hands. “We care,” the slogan repeats, hollow and relentless. Corporate power appears not as looming skyscrapers but as omnipresent branding and inescapable media noise.

In a 2024 interview with Dazed, Cheang describes how “living with the AIDS epidemic in New York City during the eighties and nineties shifted the focus of my work toward transmission. I’m conceptually interested in orgasms as data, in signals, airwaves, and viruses.” By the midnineties, Cheang was expanding her praxis into cyberspace, bringing these corporeal and technological modes of transmission to the screen. Media junk and toxic matter circulate together—the glowing screen, the glowing fish, and the glowing child render pollution both chemical and semiotic. Pleasure, contamination, information, and illness all move through shared channels. Fresh Kill takes place in a world where technology feels sticky and bodily, and where networks seep into food, water, and flesh.

In the nineties, Cheang lived on the Bowery, on the Lower East Side of Manhattan, and belonged to a community of independent filmmakers including the likes of Spike Lee and Jim Jarmusch. “For a woman filmmaker, particularly of Asian descent, to try to make an independent film in 35 mm was quite a task,” she said in an interview. “It was more like a political statement.” The film’s crew was racially mixed and predominantly women. With cinematographer Jane Castle, Cheang juxtaposes carefully staged family scenes in deep, saturated colors with grainy television clips.

The film’s frenetic editing (by Lauren Zuckerman) approximates the experience of channel surfing, an embodied mediation that anticipated how our media consumption would evolve over the subsequent decade, first with web surfing and now with doomscrolling. Other American independent films of the time that were similarly shaped by the AIDS crisis are also formally disruptive and politicized, as articulated in B. Ruby Rich’s conceptualization of a New Queer Cinema. Works like Jennie Livingston’s Paris Is Burning (1990) and Todd Haynes’s Poison (1991) embrace queer lives as unstable, defiant, erotic, and politically charged, often foregrounding antiheroes and leaving endings unresolved.

Fresh Kill participates in the New Queer Cinema while also drawing from cybernetic critique, a framework that understands how power is exercised through systems and feedback loops rather than by singular agents. Cheang visualizes this logic through interconnected scenes of toxic waste, food supply chains, and broadcast media. After Claire and Shareen team up with Jiannbin, their investigation unfolds through acts of interception. They tap into corporate databases, trace waste shipments across borders, and pirate broadcast channels to leak information. These narrative moments are punctuated by hijacked television segments and fake commercials, mimicking the tactics of signal jamming. In staging the tactical misuse of corporate media infrastructures as resistance, Fresh Kill anticipates what would soon be named “hacktivism,” the use of hacking as civil disobedience to expose and resist systems of power. Soon after its release, the film was noted in hacker circles as an influence on cyber-activist thinking, and one of the earliest mentions of the term hacktivism was in a review of Fresh Kill.

At the film’s heart is an ecopolitical terrain in which waste is a lived reality. The Fresh Kills landfill, a literal mound of consumed and discarded lives and objects, is both backdrop and character—an omnipresent deposit of capitalist ruins. Throughout Cheang folds shots of this American wasteland into footage of Orchid Island, a nuclear-waste site in Taiwan tied to her own early life. The film opens on that island, with three rowboats silhouetted against open water, bells chiming faintly on the soundtrack. This serene image is immediately ruptured by the vibrating blue screen of a CRT monitor, scored by blaring electric guitar, before giving way to the chaotic life of the landfill. The sequence establishes the film’s governing logic of relay and interruption, between land and screen, periphery and metropolis. Shareen, a picker, hustles through winding mounds of refuse, passing figures staged like allegories of disposal: a woman racing with an overloaded cart, a man pantomiming a bath in a discarded fountain drained of water, an Indigenous activist hammering a sign into a post. A wall of CRT monitors, evoking a rogue Nam June Paik installation, flickers with unstable news footage announcing a waste barge searching for a port. The broadcast collapses into Orchid Island once more, where a mother and child watch American television and waves crash over the black screen of a computer monitor, half buried in the surf.

This oscillation continues as the film cuts to Claire working at the opulent sushi restaurant, serving suited elites. As she ferries home, we see the city skyline under a veil of red smog that bleeds down the frame. Documentary-like footage of Indigenous rowers on Orchid Island punctures the fiction. Capital accumulates in metropolitan interiors while risk is displaced outward, along racialized and colonial lines. From its opening movements, Fresh Kill identifies environmental racism as a planetary system.

The film’s casting extends this critique into kinship itself. Racial differences are neither explained nor resolved: Shareen is South Asian, Claire is white, Honey is Black; Shareen’s father is Native American; Claire’s mother is Black, her brother East Asian; and so on. Multiracial family ties are presented as given rather than exceptional. Identity operates here as a networked condition, reflecting both the global composition of New York City and the chosen families that queer life sustains and reproduces.

Peeking through the toxic media and material bombardment, we witness the protagonists hacking into broadcasts to expose corporate malfeasance. Cheang situates her practice in this dual sense of media as both an actual instrument of domination and a potential instrument of resistance. She demands that we intervene and recognize our own agency in the act of transmission. In doing so, she anticipated the feminist and political strategies that would later shape net art and digital activism, from Old Boys Network, whose internet art hacked the language of technology with sex and slime, to Electronic Disturbance Theater, which used websites to coordinate digital disruptions as protest. Like Fresh Kill, these practices treated networks as contested terrain.

For Cheang, that strategy would culminate in Brandon (1998–99), a monumental project that became the first web-based artwork commissioned and acquired by the Guggenheim Museum. This was at a time when publishing art online was still novel—only a few years after the World Wide Web had entered public use. The commission was pivotal: a major institution entrusting an emergent technology to an artist whose work had long questioned systems of visibility and control. Cheang used this unprecedented platform to construct a nonlinear, hyperlinked narrative around the life and 1993 murder of Brandon Teena in Nebraska, foregrounding a trans man’s story in a space typically associated with heteronormative visions of the future. In doing so, she demonstrated how the web could function as queer historiography. Brandon did for identity what Fresh Kill did for ecology: it rewired the conditions under which representation and power could be contested.

Unlike many films of its era, Fresh Kill weaves eroticism into the fabric of resistance. Pleasure becomes a language of insurgency, just as intimacy in “deviant” bodies can become a site of political contestation. After Honey disappears, Shareen and Claire are overcome with grief. They make love, disheveled, eyes swollen from crying, lipstick smeared. The encounter is slow, fraught, and emotionally raw. It cuts abruptly to a television newscast with a suited commentator who declares they “shouldn’t have had a kid in the first place . . . unfit, unsettled, untidy, unsafe, unmoral.” Their queerness is weaponized as evidence of deviance; they and their fellow activists are branded terrorists. A close-up of a mouth follows—it’s GLOBEX again: “We care.” Cheang’s later films push these explorations even further: I.K.U. is a sci-fi cycling of orgasmic data and the corporate commodification of pleasure, and UKI is a viral, queer saga of infected bodies and techno-liberation. But even in the early exercise of Fresh Kill, eroticism is already present as a force, insisting that desire and politics are inseparable.

Three decades after the premiere of Fresh Kill, we realize how little some conditions have changed and how many of the film’s insights describe our current political moment. Corporate power remains unrestrained, environmental injustice has accelerated, queer kinships are still contested, and hacktivist interventions are on the front lines of cultural struggle. But in celebrating Fresh Kill and its place within Cheang’s work, we see that her science fiction is inseparable from her lived politics. From Fresh Kill’s eco-cybernetic exposé to UKI’s viral insurgencies, I.K.U.’s pornographic data economy, and GARLIC=RICH AIR’s satirical commons, she consistently locates the future in sites of contamination. Taken together, this extraordinary oeuvre affirms Cheang as a foundational architect of queer science fiction, anticipating contemporary debates around technology and power. Within Cheang’s world, scenes from a near-distant future create diagnostic tools for the present.