Room One Cat Auburn, Clare Barone, Assaf Ezra, Gill Gatfield, Young Sun Han, Imogen Kerr, Owen Leong, Jason Lingard, Maryann Pennington, Clinton Phillips
05 Feb to 23 Feb 2008
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Room Two
Owen Leong
05 Feb to 23 Feb 2008
>> See "Current Exhibitions" at the City Art Rooms, Auckland, New Zealand.
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Owen Leong mobilises race, liminal states, abjection and transformation in contemporary art. Working with video, sculpture and installation his works harness simple gestures of the performing body with materials such as milk, honey, prosthetic wounds, and sugar antlers. The artist visualises the 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 work attempts an emptying of the self. Holes appear in the surface of his body, out of which leak honey and milk. Evoking darkness and longing, a ghost heart made of aluminium mesh casts two phantom shadows while bleeding in reverse. These pieces produce spatial anxieties in which time dissolves and gravity evaporates into loss and desire. Owen Leong has exhibited widely in Australia and internationally. His work has been shown in London, Manchester, Liverpool, Poznan, Beijing, Shanghai, Shenzhen, Hong Kong and Singapore. In 2005 he was awarded an Australia Council New Work Grant. He recently completed a three-month artist residency at Chinese Arts Centre, Manchester. In 2008 he will be artist-in-residence at the Moya Dyring Studio, Cité Internationale des Arts, Paris. (www.owenleong.com)
