Leonard Suryajaya creates lush, fantastical images that meditate on intimacy, belonging, and home. Vibrating with colour, pattern, and texture, his photographs pay close attention to everyday objects and their relational significance to his subjects, who are family, friends, and community members. Through Suryajaya’s camera lens, these mundane items become conduits for love, kinship, boredom, anxiety, or grief, channelling the oft-inexpressible contours of intimate or familial bonds.

Parting Gift for Quarantine Blues is a site-specific installation that cumulatively reflects on Suryajaya’s past, present, and future relations. The installation weaves together images from his two most recent bodies of work: Quarantine Blues, which focuses on Suryajaya’s life and community in Chicago during the COVID-19 pandemic; and Parting Gift, which explores his relationship to his Chinese-Indonesian family as he applies for US citizenship, a process that will ultimately necessitate the renunciation of his Indonesian citizenship.

Originally trained in theatre, Suryajaya’s photographs often begin with the creation of an elaborate set. He then populates the set with a curated selection of everyday objects that offer glimmers of insight into his subjects, familial histories, or relational dynamics. Finally, his friends or family activate the set, assuming absurd and humorous poses that gesture to the depth, tenderness, and complexity of their bond with Suryajaya. The specifics of the set and pose are often developed through conversation with his subjects – the resulting image is a mediated reflection of a relationship at a particular place and time. Certain people, objects, and set pieces appear in different contexts across multiple photographs, alluding to the fluidity of interpersonal dynamics, and the ways in which material fragments become imbued with meaning through the passage of time.

The photographs are layered on top of a vinyl wallpaper that envelops the gallery space. The wallpaper offers a tangle of fragmented images – the eyes of his partner, family, and friends, rogue crawfish (an invasive pest in Chicago’s waterways), and snippets of water, land, architecture, and sky from Chicago and his hometown in Indonesia. The resulting composite images are equal measures foreboding and playful. They gesture at once to the multiple and converging global crises that mark our geopolitical landscape, and to the significance of community, family, and networks of support amidst a climate of precarity.

Suryajaya’s process serves as a vehicle for him to navigate complicated familial histories of migration, displacement, assimilation, intergenerational trauma, and a complex dance between individual autonomy and the familial collective. Suryajaya’s images resonate with the tensions inherent to growing up within the Chinese diaspora in Indonesia, to being queer within a religious family in a conservative country, and to navigating citizenship claims across two countries, each with an ascendant far right politic. The installation’s component images together reflect ambivalently on what it means to belong, and how the relationships and objects that punctuate our everyday lives coalesce into home.

Part of Exposure Photography Festival 2024.