INDAAR Featured Artist: Owen Leong
Owen Leong was born in Sydney, Australia where he completed a Master of Fine Arts at the College of Fine Arts, University of New South Wales.
With a strong emphasis on experimentation and innovation, Owen Leong’s interdisciplinary art practice critically engages with race and gender. His sculptural, photographic and installation works are influenced by horror and science fiction films, queer theory, experimental sound and underground music, through to Asian identity traders and artists working with autofictions.
Leong’s artistic practice explores liminality, abjection and transformation. His artwork visualises structures that mark our bodies through race, gender and colour. His video performances blur the boundaries between real and fictional selves to explore how the body is physically, socially and culturally framed. His artistic practice explores corporeal encoding and the disruption of hierarchical systems to elicit the diffuse, and often invisible, power of white hegemony.
More recently, his photographs depict contemporary Asian-Australian shapeshifters. Liminal beings appear to transform with their dark animal eyes, and faces that shimmer with the markings of Australian moth wings.
Fascinated by transformation, metamorphosis and transcendence, Leong visualises a hybrid Asian-Australian body with native Australian moths. Just as a tattoo leaves an indelible mark on the surface of the skin, these portraits visualise the mark of psychosocial forces on the body. Leong’s work evolves from the premise that identities are fluid and constantly changing, and uses the body and skin as a surface across which social and cultural forces are transmitted.
Owen Leong has exhibited widely in Australia and internationally. He has held solo exhibitions at Ryan Renshaw, Brisbane; Mori Gallery, Sydney; and Room 35, Sydney. His work has been included in major international group exhibitions at Gallery Primo Alonso, London; Zendai Museum of Modern Art, Shanghai; and The Hart Centre for the Arts, Beijing.
A three time finalist in the Helen Lemprière Traveling Art Scholarship, he has been the recipient of numerous awards and grants from the Australia Council for the Arts, Ian Potter Cultural Trust and Art Gallery of NSW. He has held residencies at Artspace, Sydney; Chinese Arts Centre, Manchester; Cité Internationale des Arts, Paris; and Tokyo Wonder Site, Japan.
Owen Leong is represented in Australia by Anna Pappas Gallery.
More information on Owen Leong at www.owenleong.com