Simon Leung
Associate Professor of Studio Art
New Genres, Critical Theory, Contemporary Art History, Drawing, Performance
BA magna cum laude, University of California, Los Angeles, 1987
Whitney Program 1988-89
Leung's main areas of interests are in historical and contemporary art practices (visual art, writing, performance, film, opera, etc) where aesthetic form is dialectically engaged with political, ethical, social and psychological life. He works frequently with students in the PhD program in Visual Studies, and is also Affiliate Faculty in Asian American Studies; the Center in Law, Society and Culture; and the Center for Global Peace and Conflict Studies.
Leung's work in various media is project-based. Such projects include: a reposing of Duchamp's oeuvre as an discourse in ethics; a rethinking of the psychological, philosophical, and political dimensions of AIDS in the figure of the glory hole; and meditations on "the residual space of the Vietnam War," comprising of projects on the squatting body as counter-architecture, military desertion as askesis, and surfing. A solo museum exhibition, "Proposal for The Side of the Mountain," an opera/film/installation (the opera written in collaboration with composer Michael Webster), was presented at the Santa Monica Museum of Art in 2002. The exhibition is part of a larger opera project "The Side of the Mountain," for which in 2004 Leung completed "Botany and Rhetoric," a video overture, in collaboration with composer Luke Stoneham. In 2006, he completed a single channel video installation, "Mulholland (a sketch for a song)", which is a part of the first act of the opera.
Leung's other solo exhibitions include Pat Hearn Gallery, NY (1996); Refusalon, San Francisco (1997); and Huntington Beach Art Center (1998). His work has also been presented at the Venice Biennale (2003); the Luleå Summer Biennial (2005); the Whitney Biennial (1993); the Museum of Modern Art; PS1 Museum, NGBK (Berlin); the Kunstahlle Fredericianum (Kassel); the MIT List Visual Arts Center; the Art Institute of Chicago; the Museum of Contemporary Art (Los Angeles); Los Angeles County Museum of Art; Los Angeles Contemporary Exhibitions; the Generali Foundation (Vienna); National Museum of Contemporary Art (South Korea); Sala Mendoza (Caracas); and the International Museum of Surfing.
His work is discussed in American Art after 1945 (Thames and Hudson, 2003) by David Joselit; Contract with the Skin (Univ. of Minnesota Press, 1998) by Kathy O'Dell; and the Encyclopedia of Aesthetics (Oxford University Press, 1998). Catalogues include the making of (Generali Foundation 1998); Surf Vietnam (Huntington Beach Art Center 1998); Flight Patterns (MOCA 2000); and Simon Leung: Proposal for The Side of the Mountain (Santa Monica Museum of Art 2002). Articles on Leung include: X-tra, Vol.5, NO. 4, 2003 ("Concert Notes from Near the Side of the Mountain," Christopher Miles); Art in America, May 1999 ("Of War and Remembrance," David Joselit); Documents, Winter 1999 ("Simon Leung, Surf Vietnam ," Juli Carson); Texte zur Kunst, June 1997 ("Site-specificity revisited: Zu Simon Leung's Proposal for Surf Vietnam," Pamela Lee); Village Voice, July 9, 1996 ("Code Front," Bill Arning).
Leung's various essays have been translated into French, Portuguese and German. Recent published writings include "Site-specificity en-abyme" in Surface Tension: Problematics of Site, (Errant Bodies Press, 2003); and "Transcrypts: Some Notes Between Pricks," published in The invisible flâneuse? (Manchester University Press, 2006). An anthology Leung co-edited, Theory in Contemporary Art since 1985, was published by Blackwell in 2004. He was on the editorial board of Art Journal from 1998-2004. In Fall 2006, Leung organized an exhibition at the University Art Gallery at UCI, "The Look of Law," which was also the title of a related conference and film/video series. The conference will be published in a forth-coming issue of Art Journal.
He current projects include POE, a meditation on the site/non-site dialectic inspired by Robert Smithson's reception of Edgar Allan Poe; and WAR AFTER WAR, a continuation of his earlier work on the subject of war, biography, and ethics.