Join us Saturday, January 20th for the opening celebration of Ghislaine Leung’s exhibition Holdings—her first solo presentation at a US museum. Central to Leung's work are concise “scores": written descriptions that outline the implementation and materials of a work, which an institution then interprets and executes in conversation with the artist. Her new exhibition at the Renaissance Society brings forward some of the core personal and conceptual underpinnings of her work that are more often in the background. Through a series of new scores, Holdings negotiates the ways in which identity is constituted, articulated, accepted or disowned, in terms of both the artwork and the artist herself. Central to this is a sense of identity in motion, distributed and diasporic, plural and absent, propelled by lives that run counter to polarized logics and fixed positions.
As Leung weaves together the conceptual and the personal, she also astutely integrates formal and contextual cues. It can be tempting to favor one of these various aspects over the others when engaging with Leung’s work, perhaps depending on one’s own interests, but for her all these layers intersect. At the Ren, Leung is a close observer of her architectural, institutional, and even acoustical surroundings, recognizing them as their own sites of contingency and negotiation, the space itself becoming part of the conditional grounds for the questions at hand.
In lieu of an artist talk at the opening, Leung will be returning in March, details below.
Curated by Karsten Lund.
