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Simon Leung

Simon LeungArtist’s Statement

My foremost concern as an artist is how “the ethical,” broadly defined, can be thought and pictured. Examples:

POE, a video/sculptural meditation on Smithson’s proposal that Poe’s writing can be a prototype for rigorous ‘non-site’ investigations. Central to my premise is how the video “green screen” and the “green zone” in Baghdad can be analyzed as parallel “non-sites” in which incommensurate realities are pushed up against each other to create an illusion of a seamless whole.

War After War, an experimental film sculpture designed to duplicate and reflect on one man’s precarious existence (a nomadic professional guest who depends on the hospitality of friends and strangers to continuously take him in). A section of Kant’s essay “Perpetual Peace” functions as the script.

Artist In Residence, I arranged for the same friend (also once a refugee and army deserter) to live at the MAK Center as an “artist in residence.”

ACTIONS!, a project of art workers theater centered around three moments: protests in the art world in 1969/70; a strike against MoMA in 2000; and recent protests related to Occupy Wall Street. Presented at the Kitchen in New York in 2013, participants included Yvonne Rainer, W.A.G.E., and Andrea Fraser.

Biography

Select Solo Exhibitions

2013
The Kitchen, New York, ACTIONS!

2011
CUE Art Foundation, New York, War After War

2010
Las Cienegas Projects, Los Angeles
POE, Sigma Space, Hong Kong
Proposal for Squatting Project / Hong Kong: an image, a lecture, a
screening, a conversation, a workshop
(in conjunction with the exhibition Spectral Evidence, 1A Space, Hong Kong)

Select Group Exhibitions

2013
Sylvia Wald + Po Kim Gallery, New York, War is for the Living

2012
Locks Gallery, Philadelphia True Stories

2011
Center for Contemporary Art, Ujazdowski Castle, Warsaw, Poland, Regress Progress

2011
MAK Center for Art and Architecture, West Hollywood, 91, 92, 93: Andrea Fraser, Lincoln Tobier, and Simon Leung

Select Fellowships and Awards

2014
Fellowship, The Sterling and Francine Clark Art Institute

2011
Multi-investigator Grant, Council on Research, Computing, and Libraries, University of California, Irvine

2010
Durfee Foundation, Artists’ Resource for Completion Grant

2010
University of California Institute for Research in the Arts (UCIRA)

EDUCATION

1988-89
Whitney Museum Independent Study Program

1987
BA magna cum laude, University of California, Los Angeles