Owen Leong was born in Sydney. He is a contemporary artist exploring identity, 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. 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.

Owen Leong completed a Master of Fine Arts at College of Fine Arts UNSW in 2005, where he was the recipient of a prestigious Australian Postgraduate Award. He has exhibited widely in Australia and internationally. Recent solo exhibitions include Tidal Skin at Nellie Castan Gallery, Melbourne; Infiltrator at Grantpirrie Gallery, Sydney; and White Amnesia at Sherman Galleries, Sydney.

His work has been included in major international group exhibitions including the Liverpool Biennial Independents, Liverpool; Magic Spaces at Today Art Museum, Beijing; Soft Power at Zendai Museum of Modern Art, Shanghai; and Asian Attitude: Transit Forces at the National Museum of Poznan, Poland.

Leong was awarded the Visual Arts Centre Facade Project Public Art Commission by La Trobe University and the City of Greater Bendigo in 2012. He received the people’s choice award in the prestigious Bowness Photography Prize in 2009. 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. Leong’s work is held in numerous private collections across Australia, New Zealand, and the United Kingdom.