Leonard Suryajaya’s Photos Let You See the World Through Outsider’s Eyes

Multimedia artist Leonard Suryajaya lives at the intersection of many identities. Growing up queer in Muslim Indonesia as a member of the Chinese ethnic minority, he knows outsider status many times over, and it’s through this canted lens, the perspective of someone who’s standing upright in a room that’s crooked around him, that the works in his new show, Don’t Hold on to Your Bones, explore the world.

"[Suryajaya’s] works show how the everyday is layered with histories, meanings, and potential, writes Professor David J. Getsy of  School of the Art Institute of Chicago.  "In elaborately staged photographs bursting with competing patterns and colors, Leonard creates absurd but affectionate tableaux featuring his family.  Enlisting his loved ones into his photographic project, he encourages ever more wild combinations and poses as means for them to perform their loyalty.  The results are photographs that are tender and critical, bound up as they are with the struggles of familial authority and self identity."

Though Suryajaya’s partner and family are the players in the scenes staged in his work, his family isn’t much interested in his art. "After I develop the films, scan them and send them the images, I don't hear back,” he tells The Creators Project. “I think for them my work happens in the process of taking the photographs.” But while the end result of his photography is of course beautiful and thought-provoking, the process matters to Suryajaya, too. “What was so fulfilling to me in the process is the ability and goal to forge relationships between my subjects and me,” he writes.

Don't Hold On to Your Bones is presented by the Chicago Artists Coalition and runs from March 4th to March 24th. For more information, click here.

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