Mark Leong: The Heaviness of Consumption
Curator. San Francisco Arts Commission Galleries: City Hall. December 2006 - March 2007
Mark Leong arrives in mainland China just a day after the 1989 Tiananmen Square crackdown and remains to explore the tensions of a society at once rapidly modernizing and deeply rooted in tradition. Over sixteen years of living in Beijing and traveling across China, Leong captures images that reveal both the visible and the subtle currents of everyday life, encompassing official public spaces and clandestine private moments. His recent body of color work, The Heaviness of Consumption, documents the effects of China’s emerging market culture on urban and rural communities alike, portraying a society in the midst of profound economic and social transformation.
As China evolves from socialist isolation into the world’s manufacturing powerhouse, Leong examines the new era of personal choice, desire, and consumption that accompanies unprecedented wealth and globalization. The photographs reflect a landscape where education, entertainment, and even intimacy become commodities, and where prosperity is unevenly distributed across a vast population. With sensitivity and rigor, Leong’s work captures both the promise and the anxiety of this transformation, marking the beginning of a long-term project that considers the human consequences of China’s rapid cultural and economic shifts.
About Mark Leong
Mark Leong is a fifth-generation American-Chinese from Sunnyvale, California. After graduating magna cum laude from Harvard University in 1988, he was awarded a George Peabody Gardner Traveling Fellowship to spend a year taking pictures in his ancestral homeland. In 1992, he again visited China as an artist-in-residence at the Central Academy of Fine Art in Beijing, sponsored by a fellowship from the Wallace Foundation. In 2003, Leong joined the photo agency, Redux Pictures. His book China Obscura was published in 2004.
Leong is a contributing photographer for National Geographic. HIs photos have appeared in the New York Times Magazine, New Yorker, Smithsonian, Stern, Fortune and Time. His work has been recognized with awards from National Endowment for the Arts (1992), Fifty Crows International Fund for Documentary Photography (2002), the Overseas Press Club (2007) and the Open Society Foundation (2005, 2014) among others. In 2010, he was named the Veolia Wildlife Photojournalist of the Year for his regional coverage of the Asian wildlife trade. Exhibitions of his work include solo shows at the Carpenter Visual Arts Center at Harvard University (1991), the San Francisco Arts Commission at City Hall (2007), and the Leica Gallery in Frankfurt (2008).
After many years based in Beijing, he currently lives in the San Francisco Bay Area, but returns frequently to China.