About the Exhibition
Ghislaine Leung: Holdings

My father disliked where he was from. He wanted to leave as soon as he knew he was there. He drew military boats and watched American films and British TV. He said he was like a 12-year-old when he arrived in the UK at 20. His mother became ill when he was still at university in London, my brother only a small baby at home. He went to see her, and she died two weeks after he returned. He coughed constantly, always ill. And later, after I was born, his father refused to travel, sick himself and uncertain. And we did not travel to him, he didn’t write to us. My father was embarrassed by his father’s poor English, their small home, with nowhere for anyone to stay. Troubled by the gulf of difference between that place and his new English wife and children, his new life forged apart from this old one. The places he had lived in were no longer there, the wide waters he rowed across as a child now only small. His father and mother so proud of his achievements, the ones that took him away from them. When achievement could only mean being what you weren’t. Still, I’ll hold that absence that you gave me, I’ll love it and you. Because those who are not understood as enough, even to themselves, are, and always were, enough.

— Ghislaine Leung

Works in Exhibition:

GLX, 2024
A school photo of the artist in its original cardboard frame with a handwritten note on the back. The Chinese characters copied out by the artist as a child, unreadable to her then and now, translate as “To grandpapa from Ghislaine, 87.” Never sent.

Holdings, 2024
Score: An object that is no longer an artwork.

Holdings, 2024
Score: An object that is no longer an artwork.

Holdings, 2024
Score: An object that is no longer an artwork.

Holdings, 2024
Score: An object that is no longer an artwork.

Holdings, 2024
Score: An object that is no longer an artwork.

Wants, 2024
Score: A song from a film the artist’s father watched repeatedly before moving to the United Kingdom in 1970.

Jobs, 2024
Score: A list of jobs held by the artist.

Ghislaine Leung’s work embodies a steady effort to unravel value structures and the dynamics of labor in different contexts, including the systems that are devoted to art’s production and public presentation. Leung often brings this into view through her close observation of the dependencies and displacements that shape her life and ours. Central to the practice are concise “scores.” These written descriptions outline the implementation and materials of a work, which an institution then interprets and performs in conversation with the artist.

Leung’s exhibition at the Renaissance Society brings forward some