Simon Leung
Professor
New Genres, Critical Theory, Contemporary Art History, Performance
B.A. magna cum laude, University of California, Los Angeles, 1987; Whitney Museum Independent Study Program 1988-89
Simon Leung is an artist whose foremost concern is how “the ethical,” broadly defined, can be thought and traced. His projects, developed across media, include a rethinking of AIDS and otherness through the figures of the pinprick and the glory hole; meditations on the “residual space of the American/Vietnam War,” comprising works on the squatting body as counter-architecture, military desertion as askesis, and surfing; a video essay on the site/non-site dialectic instigated by Robert Smithson’s reception of Edgar Allan Poe, with a cameo by Yvonne Rainer; a reconsideration of Marcel Duchamp’s oeuvre as a discourse in ethics, as seen through Étant donnés; and “squatting projects” in Berlin, New York, Chicago, Vienna, Guangzhou, and Hong Kong, where the squatting body, as a heuristic cipher, is interpreted through the conditions of each city.
Leung’s more recent works include the culmination of a 20-year collaboration with Warren Niesłuchowski in two projects from 2011: Artist in Residence, a site-specific work for the MAK Center for Art and Architecture in Los Angeles, and the film War After War. ACTIONS!, a performance of “art workers’ theater” inspired by the PASTA/MoMA strike of 2000, protests from 1969–70, and more recent art/activism including Occupy Wall Street, was presented at the Kitchen in New York in 2013. His opera project The Side of the Mountain, set in Los Angeles’ Griffith Park, was developed in sections—Botany and Rhetoric (overture, 2004); …that this is here… (first act, 2005, 2006); and Proposal for The Side of the Mountain (third act, 2002)—which have been shown in galleries across Europe and the United States. Collaborators for the opera include composers Luke Stoneham and Michael Webster.
Exhibitions featuring Leung’s work include the Venice Biennale (2003), the Whitney Biennial (1993), the Luleå Summer Biennial (2005), and the Guangzhou Triennial (2008). His work has also been presented at Kunstverein München; the Art Institute of Chicago; the Centre for Contemporary Art, Ujazdowski Castle in Warsaw; the MIT List Visual Arts Center in Cambridge; the National Museum of Contemporary Art, South Korea; Sala Mendoza in Caracas; 1A Space in Hong Kong; the Generali Foundation in Vienna; Kunsthalle Fredericianum in Kassel; NGBK and Künstlerhaus Bethanien in Berlin; the Museum of Modern Art, the New Museum, PS1, and American Fine Arts in New York; and the Museum of Contemporary Art in Los Angeles. Solo presentations include Pat Hearn Gallery, Anthology Film Archives, Los Angeles Contemporary Exhibitions, the Drawing Center, Huntington Beach Art Center, Las Cienegas Projects, CUE Art Foundation, the Kitchen, and the Santa Monica Museum of Art.
Leung’s writings and interviews have appeared in October, Printed Projects, Surface Tension, Shifter, Public Culture, and Documents, as well as the anthologies The Invisible Flâneuse? (Manchester University Press, 2006) and Global Visual Cultures: An Anthology (Wiley-Blackwell, 2011). He is co-editor, with Zoya Kocur, of Theory in Contemporary Art since 1985 (2nd ed., Wiley-Blackwell, 2012). His work has been translated into French, German, Chinese, and Korean.
At UC Irvine, Leung conceived and organized The Look of Law (2006), an exhibition examining representations of the state in relation to the psyche, presented at the University Art Gallery. The project also included a film and video series and a conference, the latter published in the fall 2007 issue of Art Journal. His introductory essay received the Art Journal Award from the College Art Association.
Leung has received fellowships from the Guggenheim Foundation, the Sterling and Francine Clark Art Institute, the New York Foundation for the Arts, the New York State Council on the Arts, the City of Los Angeles Department of Cultural Affairs, and the California Community Foundation. He has also been awarded grants from Art Matters, the Maryland Arts Council, the MICA Foundation, and the University of California Institute for Research in the Arts.
At UC Irvine, Leung teaches in the Department of Art and is an affiliate faculty member in the Critical Theory Emphasis; the Department of Asian American Studies; the Department of Gender and Sexuality Studies (Queer Studies); the Center in Law, Society and Culture; the Center for Global Peace and Conflict Studies; and the Center for Asian Studies.
