Document Type
Essay
Abstract
[Introduction]
Born in Hong Kong and raised there and in Northern California, Simon Leung is an accomplished intellectual—activist, artist, curator, writer, and editor [1]. The mainstay of his art since 1994 has been a series of squatting projects in which the chief concerns are with migration, performativity, and law. Each project was a temporary intervention in a particular city that figured in the interlinked movements of people, capital, and language. To date, there have been four squatting projects; the first was located in Berlin. Leung also created a fifth one for the Third Triennial Exhibition in Guangzhou, China that opened at the Guangdong Museum in September, 2008 [2.] What follows are details of the projects that were made in Berlin, New York, Chicago, and Vienna [3]. Although these works form a series, they do not constitute a purely continuous body of work. There are commonalities between projects, primarily in the artist's self-conscious use of squatting as both figure and ground. Throughout these works, he has also engaged metaphorical and metonymical orders of language in which replaced terms are both negated and evoked by a process of substitution. Thus, I see in the works the ambiguity of fetishism and the sensibility of waiting.
Repository Citation
Paice, Kim. "Simon Leung Squatting, Waiting." Reconstruction: Studies in Contemporary Culture vol. 9, no. 2, 2009, pp. 1–18. https://digitalcommons.odu.edu/reconstruction/vol9/iss2/12