Since the 1990s, Simon Leung has undertaken art projects using the squatting body as a heuristic cipher, each time addressing a local context (site, language, news, histories, politics, terms of invitation, etc.) as the structure through which a squatting project is formed. Leung's free, public online lecture as part of the Spring 2021 Intra-Disciplinary Seminar series will revisit these projects throughout the years, moving closer and closer to Hong Kong, the city in which Leung was born. Through a decade-long meditation of a photograph from 1967 depicting the colonial police's arrest of “leftists,” Leung imagines what rough beast(s) squat towards Hong Kong now as the city withstands the lashes of history.

Zoom registration required.

Simon Leung’s projects include an opera set in Griffith Park; a live/video work honoring the pedagogy of the glory hole; a trilogy on the residual space of the Vietnam War;  proposing Duchamp’s oeuvre as a discourse in ethics; collaborations with the late Warren Niesłuchowski; and “art workers’ theater” addressing the intersection of art, labor, education, institutions. His work has been shown internationally since 1990, including at the Whitney Biennial, the Venice Biennale, and the Gwangju Biennale. He co-edited Theory in Contemporary Art Since 1985 and has received fellowships from the Guggenheim Foundation, Clark Art Institute, NYSCA, NYFA, and Art Matters. He lives in Brooklyn and LA and teaches at UC Irvine.

The IDS public lecture series is part of the Robert Lehman Visiting Artist Program at The Cooper Union. We are grateful for major funding from the Robert Lehman Foundation. The IDS public lecture series is also made possible by generous support from the Open Society Foundations.