NYAB Event - Simon Leung "War After War"

Simon Leung "War After War"

CUE Art Foundation

This event has ended.

Simon Leung has been redefining the negotiation of territory and boundaries of identity and culture, both in physical and metaphorical ways, for the past fifteen years. Born in Hong Kong (then a British Territory), and relocating to Northern California with his family at a young age, Leung has, in his works both past and present, consistently reflected on cultural conditions that run parallel in daily and intellectual life.
Since the early nineties, Leung has been making what he calls squatting projects’—a group of works based on the performative gesture of the squatting body—a move he perceives as a commentary on cultural specificity, and a temporary occupation taken up in an economic and sociopolitical position. Squatting is common amongst peasants or working class laborers in China and many other Asian cultures. A position of rest—an approximation of a seated position—Leung’s action can be seen as an intervention, relocating the subject’s position within a cultural landscape. In a ‘squatting project’, Leung both intervenes and interacts with the context of his occupation. These actions have taken shape as performative interventions as well as in various material forms in various locations around the world, from street posters installed site-specifically in Berlin, to a video installation in Guangzhou, China.
Leung’s interest has been in the shape of the audience’s response, whether reaction or inaction, to the position that his body takes. Whereby a position occupied in one culture—such as squatting—necessitates questions and reactions from another; the position of a subject in one context becomes objectified in another context. In the to-and-fro of reading and misreading, the boundaries of a subject are defined.
Leung has, in more recent works, taken up the notion of slippage in the narratives of identity and representation. In his video and filmic work, Leung investigates the formation of a subject through the use of language. In 2007, Leung installed POE, a filmic video collaboration at Wave Hill in the Bronx, featuring Yvonne Rainer, Warren Niesluchowski, and the late Gregory Poe (a distant relative of the poet) as players who weave through the spaces and works of Edgar Allen Poe in order to engage in a psychographic attenuation between allegories of the internal and external dialectics of life and art. A three-channel version of POE was recently installed at Las Cienegas Projects in Los Angeles.
For his installation at CUE Art Foundation, Leung furthers his video investigation into the life of Warren Niesluchowski (the subject of a 1993 project at PS1, and more recently a participant in the Polish segment of POE).
Well known for his vigorous intellectualism and as a professor to younger artists, Simon Leung has been practicing the art of underestimation for the past two decades. Quietly, he has made a meaningful and insightful body of work known and appreciated in certain spheres, but with little exposure. With an interest in presenting his work in this context, I would hope for more of us to be exposed to the ideas and the complexities within Simon Leung’s work.
[Image: Simon Leung, Still from "War After War" (2011) Single-channel video]