Owen Leong is a contemporary artist exploring liminality, abjection and transformation. Working with photography, video, and installation his art blurs the boundaries between real and fictional selves to explore how the body is physically, socially and culturally framed.

His artwork visualises the structures that mark our bodies through race, gender and colour. His artistic practice explores corporeal encoding and the disruption of hierarchical systems to elicit the diffuse, and often invisible, power of white hegemony in post-colonial Australia.

Fascinated by transformation, metamorphosis and transcendence, his Birthmark series visualises a hybrid Asian-Australian body with native Australian moths. His work evolves from the premise that identities are fluid and constantly changing, and uses the body and skin as a surface across which social and cultural forces are transmitted.

On a recent Asialink Visual Arts Residency in Tokyo, the artist created Frozen, a powerful temporal installation evoking darkness and longing. Inside a cage of silk and suspended from fisherman hooks were two frozen shark hearts. Over the course of a single day the hearts melted and dripped blood onto a cone of salt. These pieces produce spatial anxieties in which time dissolves and gravity evaporates into loss and desire.

Owen Leong has exhibited widely in Australia and internationally. He has held solo exhibitions at Grantpirrie Gallery, Sydney; Sherman Galleries, Sydney; Anna Pappas Gallery, Melbourne; and Ryan Renshaw, Brisbane. His work has been included in major international group exhibitions at the Liverpool Biennial Independents, Liverpool; National Museum of Poznan, Poland; Zendai Museum of Modern Art, Shanghai; and Today Art Museum, Beijing.

A three-time finalist in the Helen Lemprière Traveling Art Scholarship, he has been the recipient of numerous awards and grants from the Australia Council for the Arts, Ian Potter Cultural Trust, Art Gallery of NSW and Asialink. He has held residencies at Artspace, Sydney; Chinese Arts Centre, Manchester; Cité Internationale des Arts, Paris; and Tokyo Wonder Site, Japan.