OWEN LEONG // selected as a finalist in the Josephine Ulrick & Win Schubert Photography Award 2015

Image: Owen Leong, Mudra, 2014, archival pigment print on cotton paper, 120 x 120 cm, edition of 5 + 2 AP

Artereal Gallery artist Owen Leong has been selected as a finalist in one of the most important annual surveys of contemporary Australian photographic practice, the Josephine Ulrick & Win Schubert Photography Award 2015.

The artist has been selected for his artwork, entitled 'Mudra', which formed part of the artist's exhibition Bloodmilk which took place at Artereal Gallery in December 2014. 

Owen Leong explains his intention behind 'Mudra': A mudra is a symbolic or ritual gesture in Hinduism and Buddhism. In Sanskrit, the word mudra means seal, and is a spiritual gesture made with the hands and fingers. In this self-portrait I hold my own hands cast in the forms of mudras. In my right hand I hold the karana mudra, a powerful gesture for dispelling negative energy, while in my left I hold the gyan mudra, for opening oneself to knowledge. The doubling of hands, both real and cast, suggest grasping at a symbolic and spiritual language as a form of healing. Cloaked in black, out of my hooded jacket erupts black prismatic mineral that forms a mirror-mask protecting the wearer and reflecting the world back onto itself. Manganite has the healing power to let go of attachment and control, and to recognise that you are only responsible for your own actions and not for the actions of others.

The Josephine Ulrick & Win Schubert Photography Award exhibition takes place 28 March - 31 May 2015 at Gold Coast City Gallery and has been judged by Natalie King, (Curator, Writer and Senior Research Fellow, Victorian College of the Arts, University of Melbourne).

OWEN LEONG / VIDEO INTERVIEW

Owen Leong discusses the making of his recent body of work Bloodmilk

With thanks to Veronica Habib for creating this video

Photography, video, sculpture and installation are vehicles for Owen Leong’s unsettling yet seductive ‘story portraits’ that blur the boundaries between his real and performed selves. His body is a participatory force, co-opted as image and object; an expressive medium for his politically and culturally freighted images and themes of cultural disembodiment and constructions of power and is a persuasive platform for the making and un-making of social meanings and values.

The Bloodmilk series of confronting yet poignant photographs captures self and family images as half-length portraits that explore the complexities and power of human connection, and the anxieties of belonging and not belonging.

Owen Leong, an artist, growing up Asian in Australia, enters into psycho/physical narratives of identity and displacement between cultures.

A sexual and fetishistic undertone pervades his works and is a potent metaphor for the tension and politics of gender and cultural power plays.

A vocabulary of materials: rubber hoods and masks to disguise; metal surgical restraints to discipline and control; and modeled body organs, hearts, limbs and veins fashioned from crystal, wax and leather that are hand-held, external and exposed, are charged symbols of dominance and submission.

Infinite Love, a videoed performance, depicts an intimate close-up of the artist with an oral surgical device keeping his mouth forcibly open. White liquid drips into and over his gaping mouth from a sculpted human heart cast from frozen milk. The sequence closes in a miasma of white glutinous fluid filling the screen. Leong’s positioning of an Asian-Australian body subsumed by what he terms a ‘hegemonic Whiteness” is a visceral, haunting observation on “the shifting narratives of identity, race, and power in contemporary Australia”. Leong’s Infinite Love has been selected as a finalist in the prestigious APB Foundation Signature Art Prize 2014 to be exhibited at the Singapore Art Museum.

Blood and milk, signaling family, lineage, and the corporeal are coupled for the exhibition title. Along with honey, wax and ‘embalmed’ plant forms that stand in for the body, these substances are metaphor for survival, preservation and the life force, a pervasive concept in Leong’s works. Bloodmilk is significant for the gesture towards healing carried within these materials, and the artist’s engagement with Chinese medicine, philosophy and systems of knowledge imbedded in his Asian heritage. Leong’s body is a site for the artist’s enactment of a consciousness of race, sexuality and culture and for a wider genre of the human condition.

Owen Leong has exhibited widely in Australia and internationally. He has held solo exhibitions at Grantpirrie Gallery, Sydney; Sherman Galleries, Sydney; Anna Pappas Gallery, Melbourne; and Ryan Renshaw, Brisbane. His work has been included in major international group exhibitions at the Liverpool Biennial Independents, Liverpool; National Museum of Poznan, Poland; Zendai Museum of Modern Art, Shanghai; and Today Art Museum, Beijing.

Recent exhibitions include Tidal Skin, Nellie Castan Gallery, Melbourne (2012); Infiltrator, dianne tanzer gallery + projects, Melbourne (2012); and Infiltrator, Grantpirrie Gallery, Sydney (2011). Group exhibitions include Fables of Change, Krasnodar Institute of Contemporary Art, Russia (2014);Phantom Limb, UTS Gallery, Sydney (2013); Make Up: painted faces in contemporary photography, Monash Gallery of Art, Melbourne (2013); and Magic Spaces, Today Art Museum, Beijing (2011).

Important national photography prizes include his recent selection as a finalist in both the Josephine Ulrick and Win Schubert Photography Award and Bowness Photography Prize, and a three-time finalist in the Helen Lemprière Traveling Art Scholarship. Owen Leong has been the recipient of several awards and grants from the Australia Council for the Arts, Ian Potter Cultural Trust, Art Gallery of NSW and Asialink. He has held residencies at Artspace, Sydney; Chinese Arts Centre, Manchester; Cité Internationale des Arts, Paris; and Tokyo Wonder Site, Japan. Owen Leong will take up a Swatch Art Peace Hotel Residency in Shanghai, China in 2015. 

Owen Leong is also a current finalist in the Blake Prize which can be seen at UNSW Gallery until 31 January 2015.

HAYDEN FOWLER, OWEN LEONG AND EMILY SANDRUSSI SHORTLISTED FOR THE BLAKE PRIZE

Image: Owen Leong, Cutting (diptych), 2014, archival pigment on cotton paper, 100 x 143cm, edition of 2

Congratulations to Hayden Fowler, Owen Leong and Emily Sandrussi - all of whom are finalists in this year's distinguished Blake Prize and were selected from over 1000 entries.

Now in its 63rd year, the prestigious award is handed out annually by The Blake Society with the aim of challenging artists to investigate ideas and issues surrounding spiritual thought and religion in contemporary art and literature. Open to all faiths, artistic styles and media, the prize seeks to unearth the multitude of ways in which notions of faith can be explored in contemporary conversations.

Hayden Fowler's interdisciplinary practice reflects on the consequences of the increasing separation between humanity and nature at a time when it is becoming more and more difficult to define what is natural. He has been shortlisted for his mesmerising video artwork, New World Order. 

Owen Leong has been shortlisted for his artwork, Cutting (diptych), which depicts the artist's mother and father holding an orchid cactus entombed in wax. Also known as 'Queen of the Night', this plant can take up to a year to produce a flower that only blooms for a single night. Planted by his parents in the home where he was born, it has been nurtured and regrown from cutting to cutting and used by the artist's grandmother to make a healing soup.

In her suite of artworks, Domino Theory, Emily Sandrussi has been inspired by old photographs taken by her stepfather during the Vietnam War, which she has scanned and deliberately altered via digital corruption. Domino Theory is a poignant contemporary 'momento mori' which is both deeply personal as well as universal.

Image: Emily Sandrussi, Untitled, 2013, from the series Domino Theory, pigment inkjet print, 100 x 100cm 

  

Bloodmilk and Domino Theory can be seen at Artereal Gallery until 20 December.

The Blake Finalist Exhibition is presented at UNSW Galleries from Friday 12 December - Saturday 31 January 2015.

OWEN LEONG exhibits installation in 'Mind The Gap' at Casula Powerhouse

Image: Owen Leong, Self Portrait as Mountain, 2014, 152 x 240 x 120 cm, wood, foam, paint, pink light, rose quartz, white salt, black glitter, mirror, model scenery, model train, electronics.

Owen Leong, whose exhibition 'Bloodmilk' is currently on display at Artereal Gallery, has created a stunning installation for the group exhibition Mind the Gap at Casula Powerhouse, on show until 25 January 2015.

Entitled Self Portrait as Mountain, Owen Leong continues his exploration of the corporeal as a physical site of exchange through this installation, which visualises an internal landscape of the body through which the motion of a crystal is a journey towards healing.

As one of Casula Powerhouse Arts Centre's most ambitious projects, five contemporary artists have been invited to work with Casula’s local model train group. The artists and the model train club have collaborated to build artworks that model trains will travel through. Model train layouts usually aim to replicate in intricate detail natural landscape and architecture as realistically as possible.

The artists taking part have each coincidentally proposed fantastical worlds that are far removed from traditional model train scenery including an internal landscape of the body, a speculative future Utopia, a Baroque inspired dreamscape, a ghost train and a love train. This project merges two disparate communities and their creative worlds. One of the very few parameters for this project is that a working model train will travel through the work, allowing artists and railfans to share ideas and skills with spectacular and innovative results.

Artists: Sarah crowEST, Emily Hunt, David Lawrey and Jaki Middleton, Owen Leong, Clare Thackway and Gregory Hodge

Image: Owen Leong, Self Portrait as Mountain, 2014, 152 x 240 x 120 cm, wood, foam, paint, pink light, rose quartz, white salt, black glitter, mirror, model scenery, model train, electronics.