Simon Leung

Simon Leung was born in Hong Kong and lives in Los Angeles. He was educated at University of California Los Angeles, Columbia University, and the Whitney Museum Independent Study Program.

Leung is an artist whose work is project-based, spanning several mediums (video, performance, sculpture, drawing, critical theory, fiction, and opera), sometimes inhabiting several forms at once. Some of this project-based work include a reposing of Marcel Duchamp’s oeuvre as a discourse in ethics; a rethinking of the psychological, philosophical, and political dimensions of AIDS in the figure of the glory hole; a video essay on Edgar Allan Poe in relationship to the site/non-site dialectic; an expanded opera set in Los Angeles addressing sexuality, ecology, history, and questions of "the public"; and meditations on "the residual space of the Vietnam War," comprised of projects on the squatting body as counter-architecture, military desertion as askesis, and surfing.

He is the co-editor of Theory in Contemporary Art Since 1985 (Blackwell 2004), and since 2001 has taught at the University of California, Irvine. In 2006, he organized "The Look of Law," an exhibition/film and video program/conference addressing the literal and indirect representations of the state (war, the prison, the border, the police, etc.) as they relate to the psyche in contemporary times. His essay of the same name won the Art Journal Award from the College Art Association in 2008. As an artist, he has also been awarded grants and fellowships from the New York State Council on the Arts; the New York Foundation for the Arts; the City of Los Angeles Individual Artist Award; and the University of California Institute for Research in the Arts, among others. His latest project "Squatting Project/Guangzhou" was on view at the Third Guangzhou Triennial in China.