Leonard Yang
[Singapore]
Art Yourself Atelier is thrilled to announce Leonard Yang’s solo exhibition -- «Bringing Home, Home» on our platform.
Artist's Biography
Leonard was born in Singapore at a time when the country was rapidly undergoing social and economic transitions from third world to first, Leonard spent his childhood discovering unused back roads, hidden vistas, and pockets of nature off the beaten gravel roads that were sprouting up everywhere in the country. Leonard’s paintings shed light on ethnic ways of life, memory, erasure, gentrification, climate change and urbanization in metropolises. He paints to visualize an imagined, speculative and idealized world, one where new systems of living and remembrance are created through the pictorial integration of place, memory, imagination, and time.
Leonard most recently held a solo exhibition at Jalan Besar Salon Singapore, as well as group exhibitions at Local Project Art Space, La Bodega Gallery, and Gallery MC, in New York. Other notable venues he has exhibited in include The Institute of Contemporary Arts Singapore (ICAS), The Visual Arts Development Association (VADA) Singapore, Dongdaemun Design Centre, Korea, and the National Gallery Indonesia. Leonard studied at Nanyang Technological University, Singapore (BFA 2015), and Parsons, The New School for Design, New York, NY (MFA 2019).
Bringing Home, Home
“Instead of the rherotic of “home” being all too conveniently deployed as a matter-of-fact descriptor of an immutable set of external conditions, or trotted out as a deceptively singular, abstract aspirational idea, home is in a constant state of being revealed through particularities and the micro-poetics of our own repeated encounters with geography and space, and our memories thereof… through all the boats, through fireworks, through bodies of water, through our own hands, in our mind’s eye.”
-- «Home, from Within and Without» by Yen Phang
During the Summer of 2020, reeling from curtailed plans and job cuts amidst the pandemic, Leonard left the United States to seek shelter temporarily with family in Singapore from the Covid-19 crisis. When he arrived back in Singapore, he did not know how to feel about returning to the quiet, tropical, suburban family home.
Over the course of the last year, he felt like he had passed through worlds and endless time. From being transplanted in a blink from one city devastated by the pandemic to a safe haven in a faraway continent, his paintings became an encapsulation of an imaginary place where nature, our hands and bodies, together with vernacular houses and homes across different geographies and cultures intertwine to create a world of healing and hope. Having lived across these two vastly different places, he found himself asking what or where home is – is it a real place in his heart, or an imaginary place in his mind? Landscapes of Singapore’s parks and gardens flashed before his eyes while dreamy visions of his commutes through New York City and his regular haunts meld together in his paintings.
If only we could shed our differences, and our lived experiences blend with each other like in these dreams, perhaps the world will become better, safer, and kinder to everyone that inhabits it.