Simon Leung and Na Mira: The Moon Scratches My Heart

In their first collaboration, written and performed by Leung and directed and staged by Mira, the artists will evoke aesthetic, political and ethical inheritance through reflections on artist Theresa Hak Kyung Cha; pop/movie star Leslie Cheung; and curator/art historian Karin Higa.

Simon Leung was born in Hong Kong. His projects in various media meditate on the ethical condition, broadly defined, as challenge and possibility. They include an opera set in Los Angeles’ Griffith Park; a live/video performance addressing AIDS in the figure of the glory hole; a trilogy on “the residual space of the Vietnam War”; context-specific works on three continents centering on the squatting body as a heuristic cipher; “art workers’ theater” on the intersection of art and labor; an internet lecture-performance for the pandemic age; and decades-long collaboration with the late writer and art world figure Warren Niesłuchowski. He has taught at CalArts, UCLA, NYU, RISD, Bard MFA, and Skowhegan. Since 2001, Leung has taught at the University of California, Irvine, where he is Professor of Art, Asian American Studies, and Critical Theory.

Na Mira lives in Los Angeles. Recent exhibitions, screenings and performances include 2022 Whitney Biennial, Company Gallery, and The Kitchen, New York; Midway Contemporary Art, Minneapolis; Museum of Contemporary Art, Tucson; Paul Soto and Museum of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles; Croy Nielsen, Vienna; Kunsthalle Zurich; and Art Sonje Center, Seoul. Mira graduated from University of California Los Angeles and School of the Art Institute of Chicago. Her work is in the permanent collections of the Walker Art Center, Whitney Museum of American Art, and LACMA. Wendy’s Subway published the first collection of Mira’s writing, The Book of Na.

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