Bundanon

Lives / works: Ngunnawal, ACT

Bryan Foong (he/him/they) is a queer artist of Chinese-Malaysian heritage on unceded Ngunnawal and Ngambri Country. They make expanded painting installations that examine the processes of territorialisation and colonisation within contemporary biopolitics. Foong is a graduate from the ANU School of Art and Design (BVA Honours, Painting) with a background in biology and clinical medicine, and continues to work in the health sector. Their work has been shown in solo exhibitions and in curated projects at a range of public galleries and ARIs, including Drill Hall Gallery (Kamberi/ACT), Tributary Projects (Kamberi/ACT), SNO (Bulanaming/Sydney), CCAS (Kamberi/ACT), Blindside Gallery (Naarm/Melbourne, upcoming) and FirstDraft (Gadigal/Sydney, upcoming). Foong’s work is held in private and public collections, including the Australian National University Art Collection.

In residence at Bundanon

Bryan’s project delves into the notion of Ecstasy, and how it might be used to activate the political discourses surrounding bodily freedom, health and medicine, and our biological relations with the environment. Using a text by the American-Cuban queer theorist Jose Munoz ‘Take Ecstasy with Me’ as a point of departure, and in it, a call to ‘stand out of time together, to resist the stultifying time that is not ours’ as an abstract invitation — his interest is to take this invitation out of its queer context and imagine how we can all be ecstatic in our current times, in our own specific and sensitive way.