SYRUP 18

6 JUNE — 4 JULY

OWEN LEONG

Heavy Leather

Heavy Leather explores pleasure as power, resistance, and healing. Deconstructed bed sheets, clothing, jock straps, silk, rubber, bronze, and glass carry the materiality of touch and intimacy. This body of work will present dominance and submission as gestures of care and consent, inviting the viewer into a ritual space of devotion where power exchange becomes a love song. Inspired by Audre Lorde’s seminal essay ‘Uses of the Erotic: the Erotic as Power’, a research trip to the Leather Archives & Museum in Chicago, and the work of feminist and queer activists, this exhibition emerges from histories of collective resistance, community empowerment, and shared practices of queer joy.

BIO

Owen Leong is a visual artist whose practice spans sculpture, installation, photography, and video. His work explores counternarratives of queer world-making, using personal mythologies and kink aesthetics to examine power, control, and care, to reframe and reimagine identities and intimacies. His work centres QTBIPOC pleasure as an act of political agency and healing. At the heart of Leong’s practice is a belief in the power of art to transform the way we see ourselves and others.

Leong was an artist-in-residence at Bemis Center for Contemporary Arts, USA, in 2025. He received The Chey Fellowship in 2024 to present a major solo exhibition at IAC Western Sydney University. Previously, Leong was a finalist in the Ramsay Art Prize, Australia's premiere prize for young contemporary artists, and received the MAMA National Photography Prize and Josephine Ulrick and Win Schubert Photography Award.

Leong has exhibited widely in Australia and internationally including Singapore Art Museum, Today Art Museum Beijing, Zendai Museum of Modern Art Shanghai, OCT Contemporary Art Terminal Shenzhen, and the National Museum of Poznan Poland.

He has held artist residencies at Artspace, Sydney; Parramatta Artists’ Studios, Western Sydney; esea contemporary, Manchester; Cité Internationale des Arts, Paris; Tokyo Wonder Site, Japan; Swatch Art Peace Hotel, Shanghai; and Hong Kong Arts Centre, Hong Kong. He has received numerous grants from Creative Australia, Create NSW, Ian Potter Cultural Trust, and Asialink.

Leong’s work is held in the collections of Creative Australia, Bathurst Regional Art Gallery, Bendigo Art Gallery, Detached Cultural Organisation, Gold Coast City Gallery, Murray Art Museum Albury, Newcastle Art Gallery, Western Sydney University, Swatch Art Peace Hotel Collection Shanghai, University of Salford Art Collection UK, and private collections in Australia and internationally.

Owen Leong received his MFA from University of New South Wales, where he was the recipient of an Australian Postgraduate Award.

EO
GILL

sediment

EO Gill’s exhibition sediment includes trace-elements from their latest film The Wetting (2026). The film itself takes place across two purpose-built sets: an apartment and a public park replete with an operational water fountain. The film draws its material from melodrama and internet pornography, staging an erotically charged domestic arrangement between three figures: the Doctor, the Spinster and the Blond.

The Wetting will be premiering in the Sydney Film Festival FLUX program this June. For more information click here.

For Gill this exhibition is an experiment in remediation, where the dissociative materials of a film are made explicit. It revisits ideas from different angles and points-of-view. In so doing it considers how gender might take shape through attachments, narratives, and ideologies, and through the processes associated with viewing and making films.

Collaborators

The Doctor - Toby Tsonis

The Blond - Megan Holloway

The Spinster - Eugene Choi

BIO

EO Gill (b. 1986) is a moving-image artist and curator. Their films are situated in the real world, though hold very little regard for reality. Gill carefully constructs scenarios replete with a distinctive theatricality and resonant with references to film history and diagnostic taxonomies. Their artistic aim is to examine aspects of gender production. Gill privileges material processes including set-construction, foley and 16mm film.

Gill premiered their two-channel film ‘Conversion’ (2023) at Firstdraft in 2023. A single-channel version was subsequently presented at the Bangkok Experimental Film Festival in 2025, organised by Gridthiya Gaweewong and Apichatpong Weerasethakul. Gill’s latest film ‘The Wetting’ will premiere in this year's Sydney Film Festival FLUX program. As an independent curator Gill has developed and presented three moving-image exhibitions: ‘Screwball’ at Verge Gallery, 2022, ‘Fulgora’ at National Art School, 2023 and ‘Softcore’ at Carriageworks, 2024. They are a co-video director on Nat Randall and Anna Breckon’s highly acclaimed live theatre project ‘The Second Woman’ which continues to tour internationally.