Owen Leong's artwork visualises the structures that mark our bodies through race, gender and colour. His artistic practice explores corporeal encoding and the disruption of hierarchical systems to elicit the diffuse, and often invisible, power of white hegemony in post-colonial Australia.
Fascinated by transformation, metamorphosis and transcendence, his Birthmark series visualises a hybrid Asian-Australian body with native Australian moths. His 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.
On a recent Asialink Visual Arts Residency in Tokyo, the artist created Frozen, a powerful temporal installation evoking darkness and longing. Inside a cage of silk and suspended from fisherman hooks were two frozen shark hearts. Over the course of a single day the hearts melted and dripped blood onto a cone of salt. These pieces produce spatial anxieties in which time dissolves and gravity evaporates into loss and desire.
Press release courtesy THIS IS NO FANTASY.
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