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Fire in the Hole (from Erotica Magazine No. 7, Spring '00) |
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Fire in the Hole (from Erotica Magazine No. 7, Spring '00) |
| Sharon Leong is red hot and on
fire. She reveals, "Tension (esp. sexual tension) is the catalyst
behind the creation of my paintings. Painting is one of the things I do in
order to satiate the hunger that threatens to tear my life apart."
Classically trained but never tamed, she bends acrylics to her will in an
ongoing series of erotic fantasy paintings. She takes the male gaze and
holds it to a kaleidoscope. Enter her world of the risqué where there is
no shame to the sleaze, no regret to the raw, and no punishment for the
perverse.
Over the past four years Leong has created a singularly arousing body of work. She has exhibited work in the two Poptarts shows (August 1998 and September 1999) at 111 Minna in San Francisco, and in the Dangerous Dolls show (May 1999) at Roq La Rue Gallery in Seattle. Usually working in her signature 30"x 40" canvases, sometimes horizontal, sometimes in diptychs, but mostly vertical, she has defined her expressive module. She draws her inspiration from pulp paperback artwork, circus sideshow banners, and the lurid popular iconography of the 1940's-1960's. She takes the hidden and exposes it to light. The pulp novels she parodies were created as intimate guilty pleasures, pocket-sized and just right for hidden masturbation material. Leong enlarges these images to heroic proportions. No longer confined to the personal and private, the shocking rawness is exposed for all to see. As if putting the "her" in Hercules, she is pulling down the pillars of propriety and exposing society's hypocrisies. Sharon says, "It always amazes me that people are more accepting of violence than sex." A second generation Chinese immigrant raised in Sacramento, she is the bridge between East and West, Old World, and New. She honed her considerable skills at the California College of Arts and Crafts, the San Francisco Art Institute, and in Paris at L'Ecole des Beaux Arts and L'Ecole du Louvre. Her godfather is former WPA artist Dong Kingman, who once roomed with William Saroyan. Leong has been productive in other media, so watch for her to pop up in other erotic contexts. She has pioneered a genital-based photographic reproduction artform, giving new meaning to the word "darkroom." She sculpts, produces time-based works, and has presented her Vend Art Machine which dispenses Pussie Rolls (labia-kissed disposable paper g-strings). There appears to be no end to her capacity to fantasize, eroticize, and capitalize. Her work sells because it's sexy and fun to be around. Leong confides, "I regard these paintings as outsized book jackets to the unwritten (and never-to-be written) volumes of my life." As long as she paints with such abandon, prose will remain unnecessary to reveal the intimate life of this artist. Contact Zero One Gallery in Los Angeles for the work of Sharon Leong.
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