Squatting Project/Berlin. Simon Leung. 1994.
Simon Leung was born in Hong Kong and grew up in San Jose, California. He is currently a professor of Art at the University of California Irvine. Squatting Project/Berlin was the second among Leung’s Squatting Project series. It was a public poster project created as part of the artist’s 1994 residency at Künsterhaus Bethanien. Posters of a squatting Asian man were wheatpasted at bus stops, walls, and other surfaces in several Berlin neighbourhoods.
Leung said in an interview that he was inspired in part by his brother’s encounter with squatting Asian immigrants in San Jose. He concluded that although they were not squatting to call attention to themselves, “that was exactly the effect as they rested their (under)assimilated Asian bodies in a habitual position of waiting, incongruous with the sun-bathed sidewalks of a California suburb.”
On each poster the artist also attached a proposal worthy of our rumination:
1. Imagine a city of squatters, an entire city in which everyone created their own chairs with their own bodies.
2. When you are tired, or when you need to wait, participate in this position.
3. Observe the city again from this squatting position.
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