To make art is to understand how you are, to notice your prejudices and assumptions about value, to acknowledge your hand in an unequal world, and to recognise how you institute yourself – all while letting go of the outcome of work. Bosses replaces strategies of high performance with acts of trust. It is a book about doubt, about maintaining that condition and its untenable faith. About becoming a parent. Where individualism dissolves into dependence, ‘like when you get into a bath that’s the same temperature as your body, or when the summer comes and the wind touches your skin’.
Endorsements
"The artist as receiver, giver, inquisitor, communicator. Leung’s writing is emotional and profound, engaging both the very personal and the mundane, the practical and the political. Few artists dig deep into themselves like this: an extraordinary insight into the process of producing art."
—Cosey Fanni Tutti
"Artist as (girl) boss or maverick scab? The labour-gender question doesn’t stay put. Dialectics here grow as wildly and recursively as Ballardian botany. Leung ranges things seen, felt, sensed, thought and made against watertightness as form or as politics. The more gaps, the more space to remake reality."
—Marina Vishmidt
"I would call 'Bosses' auto-factual. Leung accounts for work and life co-authored with facts, conjuring a prosaic and beautiful sociality. Her negations are profound, they hold and express the social apophatically. What is not here almost feels like a choice, and the thing convulses."
—Ed Atkins
"Some events you can never correct. One of them is childbirth. If you want to know, here it is."
—Fanny Howe