Birthmark presents Owen Leong’s most recent series of photographic portraits depicting Asian-Australian ‘shape shifters’. Displaying Australian native moth markings on their faces, Leong’s subjects appear to slide between male and female, human and animal, real and unreal. Leong’s practice explores the politics of representation, investigating how the body is physically, socially and culturally framed.
In this new series he creates visual metaphors for the strange and complex meanings of belonging in contemporary Australia. This is a shift in Leong’s practice away from the artist’s body as the subject of his investigation, and towards a broader, plural field of enquiry into belonging and identity.
