Simon Leung
b. 1964, Hong Kong
Squatting Project/Wien, 1998
Pigment print
Courtesy the artist

Simon Leung uses film, photography, performance, and various media to investigate how “the ethical” can be traced in social, cultural, and discursive spaces.

Squatting Project / Wien is part of his broader inquiry into the performative gesture of squatting, which is, as Leung posits, an interrogation of cultural context and a temporary occupation taken up in an economic and sociopolitical situation. Squatting, a common posture among peasants or working-class laborers in Asia and other parts of the global South, is a form of rest. In contrast to a standing body, which often assumes a bearer of rights in Western linguistic and legal contexts, a squatting body is a counter-architecture of public space that resists a fixed essence. Leung’s focus on this posture intervenes in the cultural perceptions and social identifications of body image, thereby relocating it within a landscape of ethnically conditioned norms.