LOCATION: Outdoor exhibition at Rådhusplatsen MAP.
Leonard Suryajaya uses photography to test the boundaries of intimacy, community, and family. His works show how the everyday is layered with histories, meanings, and potential. In elaborately staged photographs bursting with competing patterns and colors, Leonard creates absurd but affectionate tableaux featuring his family and community. The results are photographs that are tender and critical, bound up as they are with the struggles of familial authority and self identity.
Many of Leonard’s investigations are rooted in the particularity of his upbringing as an Indonesian citizen of Chinese descent, as a Buddhist educated in Christian schools in a Muslim-majority country, and as someone who departed from his family and his culture’s definitions of love and family. Leonard explores these tensions in the everyday interaction, in the chance juxtaposition of culturally-coded objects, and in the disruptions stirred by queer relations.
– from a text by David J. Getsy, the Art Institute of Chicago
Leonard Suryajaya (Chicago, IL) was born a second-generation Chinese-Indonesian. He received a BA in Theatre Arts and BFA, 2013, California State University, Fullerton; MFA, 2015, School of the Art Institute of Chicago; 2017, Skowhegan School of Painting and Sculpture. Suryajaya has received numerous awards and fellowships, including the Chicago DCASE Esteemed Artist Award and the Aaron Siskind Foundation Award.
