In Owen Leong’s video installation Second Skin, the artist draws attention to the European fascination with Asian bodies as ‘Other’—as objects of simultaneous repulsion and desire—evoking an intertwined history of European colonialism and Orientalism. The artist’s face is filmed in close-up as honey is poured over his head in a single slow-motion sequence. As his hands rub the viscous liquid across his face it is unclear whether he is in pleasure or in pain. The video is deliberately ambiguous; what at first viewing appears to be a sensuous act, over time takes on a more sinister tone—the ‘sweet’ honey becomes cloying, sticky and uncomfortable. Leong often uses milk and honey in his work as ‘racial constructs’, as metaphors in which milk equals white and honey equals yellow.^[31] Much of his practice involves staging deliberate interventions against homogenising stereotypes based on Eurocentric constructions of race, in which his own body becomes the platform for alternative identities.

Figure 7.3 Owen Leong, Still from the video installation Second Skin, 2003; Courtesy of the artist and Uber Gallery, Melbourne.

Leong is highly conscious of growing up in a country dominated by ‘whiteness’. He comments:

As an Asian-Australian, he is acutely aware of dominant discourses in Australian public culture that deny him an authentic Australian identity. His work raises a very important point. Although he represents the ideal example of assimilation—born in Australia and possessing a completely Australian ‘habitus’ (that is, his way of walking and talking, his outlook and social dispositions)—he can never truly be an accepted part of the mainstream. As long as the mainstream is defined as Anglo-Australian, it does not matter how completely ‘assimilated’ he is, how often he says ‘crikey’ or how many crocodiles he wrestles; he is forever to be excluded from the category of ‘real Australian’. As Leong states, ‘It doesn’t matter how Australian I am, I can’t escape my Asian face.’^[33]