Photograph: Garry Trinh
I ACKNOWLEDGE THE GADIGAL PEOPLE OF EORA NATION AND THE DHARUG PEOPLE, THE traditional custodians of the land on which I HAVE THE PRIVILEGE TO live and woRK, AND PAY MY DEEPEST RESPECTS TO ELDERS PAST, PRESENT AND EMERGING. Sovereignty was never ceded.
Owen Leong is a multidisciplinary visual artist exploring counternarratives of queer world-making. His work navigates the body as a site of individual experience and a product of social and cultural forces. He uses personal mythologies and kink aesthetics to explore power, control, and care, to reframe and reimagine identities and intimacies. His work centres queer pleasure as an act of political agency and healing. At the heart of Leong’s practice is a belief in the power of art to transform the way we see ourselves and others.
Leong has exhibited widely in Australia and internationally including the Art Gallery of New South Wales; Art Gallery of South Australia; Queensland Art Gallery; Newcastle Art Gallery; Monash Gallery of Art; 4A Centre for Contemporary Asian Art; Singapore Art Museum; Today Art Museum, Beijing; Zendai Museum of Modern Art, Shanghai; OCT Contemporary Art Terminal, Shenzhen; and the National Museum of Poznan, Poland.
In 2024, Leong received The Chey Fellowship to present a major solo exhibition at the Institute for Australian and Chinese Arts & Culture at Western Sydney University. In 2017, Leong was a finalist in the Ramsay Art Prize, Australia's premiere prize for young contemporary artists. In 2016, Leong received the MAMA National Photography Prize and in 2015, he won the Josephine Ulrick and Win Schubert Photography Award.
Leong has been awarded numerous grants from Creative Australia, Create NSW, Ian Potter Cultural Trust, and Asialink. He is currently undertaking a two-year studio residency at Parramatta Artists’ Studios. He has also held artist residencies at Artspace, Sydney; Centre for Contemporary Chinese Art, Manchester; Cité Internationale des Arts, Paris; Tokyo Wonder Site, Japan; Swatch Art Peace Hotel, Shanghai; and Hong Kong Arts Centre, Hong Kong.
His work is held in the public collections of Creative Australia, Bathurst Regional Art Gallery, Bendigo Art Gallery, Detached Cultural Organisation, Gold Coast City Gallery, Murray Art Museum Albury, Newcastle Art Gallery, University of Salford Art Collection UK, and private collections in Australia and internationally.