Ghislaine Leung: Holdings

Ghislaine Leung, who lives in London, takes to task familiar traditions like conceptual art, readymade sculpture, and institutional critique, re-imagining their underlying questions and methods in canny, playful ways. Central to her work are concise “scores.” These written descriptions outline the implementation and materials of a work, which an institution then interprets and executes in conversation with the artist. At the heart of this are Leung’s ongoing explorations of the dynamics of value, labor, and access, as well as the kinds of dependencies and displacements that shape her life and ours.

Leung’s exhibition at the Renaissance Society—her first solo presentation at a US museum—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, some presented in their full edition, 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.

This exhibition is curated by Karsten Lund.

Ghislaine Leung’s Holdings is supported by Valeria Napoleone. 

About the artist
Ghislaine Leung was born in Stockholm, Sweden to a father from Hong Kong and a mother from London. She was raised first in Reims, France and then in London, where she lives now. She received a BA in Fine Art in Context at the University of the West of England in 2002 and a Masters in Aesthetics and Art Theory at the Centre for Research in Modern European Philosophy at Middlesex University in 2009. Between 2004 and 2014 she worked at Tate and LUX, London. Leung has had solo exhibitions at Simian, Copenhagen; Caravan in Oslo, Norway; Ivory Tars, Glasgow, Scotland; Ordet, Milan, Italy; Museum Abteiberg in Mönchengladbach, Germany; Cabinet, London; Kunstlerhaus, Stuttgart, Germany; and Chisenhale, London, among others. Her work has recently been in group exhibitions at Mudam Luxembourg; MAMCO, Geneva; Para Site, Hong Kong; Kunstverein Hamburg; KW Institute for Contemporary Art, Berlin; By Art Matters, Hangzhou, China; Museion, Bolzano, Italy; to name only a few. She was a Turner Prize nominee in 2023. Leung’s most recent book, Bosses, was published by Divided Publishing in Spring 2023. The Renaissance Society will produce a new book with Leung following the exhibition.