Ghislaine Leung

How to identify Ghislaine Leung amid the lunching crowd at a south London cafe? In this image-greedy world, Leung is that rare creature: a public figure of whose physical person no trace seems to exist online.

- Hettie Judah

Google suggested a scant handful of faces in response to the prompt: ‘Ghislaine Leung, portrait’. Among them, jarringly, was my own. It turned out to be the headshot from my article about Leung’s nomination for the 2023 Turner Prize. Still, I felt disconcertingly like I was on the receiving end of a conceptual prank.

Leung makes art that explores, among related subjects, the labour conditions of making art. Often, this is through what she refers to as ‘scores’: written descriptions or instructions to be followed to physically realize the work. For ‘Holdings’, Leung’s spring 2024 exhibition at the Renaissance Society in Chicago, these scores included ‘An object that is no longer an artwork’ (Holdings, 2024) and ‘A song from a film the artist’s father watched repeatedly before moving to the United Kingdom in 1970’ (Wants, 2024). Leung is an artist who lays down clear rules of engagement, who establishes boundaries. Part of the way she does this is by ensuring that the images which circulate are of her work rather than herself.

We met. Leung did not have my face. Leung stopped making art for many years. Between her BA (2002) and her MA (2009), she swerved from fine art to aesthetics and art theory. For over a decade, she held positions at art institutions including LUX and Tate. It was only in 2015, midway through her 30s, that she started practising as an artist again. In the intervening period, she had watched her peers getting ‘run through the mill of the industry’, she tells me. Some survived as artists. Most didn’t. They had made art for low or no pay, turned up for events, posed for photoshoots, complied and participated, yet still struggled to satisfy the demands of this voracious industry.