Leung Mee Ping’s artistic practice is essentially conceptual and investigative, and one of its strongest markers is her relentless and enduring curiousity. Leung’s mixed-media installation Made In Hong Kong is like a conceptual onion: peel away one layer of meaning and association only to find multiple layers underneath. On the first analysis, it is a sophisticated conceptual work bringing into question issues of appropriation, copying and authorship. It takes both as its model and its locus of production that artistic bastion of hand-made replication and appropriation, the ‘artist’s village’ of Dafen village in Shenzhen, which originally grew out of Hong Kong’s souvenir/trade painting. As a conceptual vehicle, Made in Hong Kong shoves us back and forth across the border, scrambling points of view, achieving multiple reversals of the tourist’s and the producer’s gaze. It is the first project in Leung’s ongoing Pearl River Delta Series of conceptual (and to some degree, performative) works in which the artist investigates the various, shifting relationships and mutual infiltration between the cities of the Pearl River Delta: Hong Kong, Macau and Shenzhen.

-Curatorial Notes: Valerie C. Doran

About the artist:

Leung Mee Ping is a Hong Kong-based artist whose conceptual, investigative practice spans a wide range of media, including installation, public and community art, performative video and mixed-media. Her creative work is concerned with issues of ethnicity, community and collective memory, and her conceptual perspective is strongly oriented towards the examination of creativity emerging from within daily culture. Through her research-based practice she engages in experimental interaction and integration in a daily-life context, developing issue-based projects which often integrate elements and platforms of theatre, design, commercial space and social space in order to extend performance or action. Leung’s creative work is strongly intertwined with her theoretical research into visual culture and issues of globalisation. Leung received her BFA (1991), from L’Ecole Nationale Superieure des Beaux-Arts in Paris, France her MFA (2000) from the California Institute of the Arts in Los Angeles, USA, and her Ph.D (2009) from the Cultural and Religious Studies Department of the Chinese University of Hong Kong. She is presently assistant professor of visual culture at the Academy of Visual Arts, Baptist University, Hong Kong.

-Osage Gallery

Image: © Leung Mee Ping
Pearl River Delta Series 1: Made in Hong Kong
2007-2014
Image courtesy of the artist