Luca Leung is an artist of Brazilian-Chinese descent based in New York City. She attained a Bachelors in Fine Arts with honours from Chelsea College of the Arts in London.
Spanning various disciplines, her work overlays multiple systems of knowledge, classification, and taxonomic schemes by deftly weaving cultural and historic signifiers with threads of her own personal lore. This serves to open a threshold into the more untranslatable parts of her psyche while sprawling familiar narratives out non-teleologically.
She communicates her worldview in a broad fusion of research and practice, which above all embodies a fundamental appreciation for the multitude of worlds we can choose to live in and create.
In Kinesics we see machine learning and qi gong collide with bamboo scaffolding; a hybrid cosmology that is foregrounded by an anthropology textbook written in the distant future. Here, medical jargon oscillates between conviction and critical parody, alluding to the fictionalization of the angiological field while still holding its ground in producing a convincing scenario.
The myopic intensity of her drawing pieces, find presence in the grain of the paper, congealing into a dense textural mass that oscillates between figure and landscape. By spending time immersed in this intricate drawing process, she refines her thinking around work and projects in other mediums. As such, her drawings give a coded yet generous insight into the coordinates of her thoughts.
Writing constitutes another continental expansion of her practice. In hermeneutic_displacement micro-focused investigations of the body contribute to an overall claustrophobic atmosphere which lingers for some time after reading. hermeneutic_displacement excavates a kind of techno-mythopoetics out of a simple interrogation of its own task and a subtly described potential performance/event. It insists, “This is not just written word. This is an activity.” The writing floats above black background, assisting the creation of images (or/and objects) with words. It is suffused with knowledge, evidencing deep research without ever needing to break character.
She is currently exploring a curatorial approach that expands the timeframe for producing an art event (4-6 months of working laterally with participant artists) in order to center situated art-making practices– pieces that are singularly enabled and activated by the exhibition space itself through deliberate spatial interventions. The artwork is a symbiotic growth in the space rather than an insertion. Her events also probe the central question of how to most completely jostle and awaken the perceptive capacities of the viewer.
Consistent in her practice is a tendency to load whatever she is making with an invitation to step into a hybrid world wherein cultural symbols and personal poetics operate multivariously according to a hidden logic. In doing so, she elevates them both to greater import than in conventional reality.
