Bio
Leonard Suryajaya is a queer Chinese-Indonesian American artist based in Chicago and Tulsa, working exclusively in analog 4×5 large-format photography alongside collage, video, installation, and public art. Born in Medan and naturalized in 2025, he develops collaborative portraits that bring communities shaped by divergent histories into a shared visual field, from elaborately staged tableaux with his families to environmental portraits made with strangers at civic sites.
Suryajaya is a 2024 Guggenheim Fellow and 2026 Tulsa Artist Fellow. His work has been exhibited internationally, including at the Art Institute of Chicago, MCA Chicago, Museum of Contemporary Photography, Fotomuseum Winterthur, Benaki Museum, and Jogja National Museum. His photographs are held in the collections of the Art Institute of Chicago, the Museum of Contemporary Photography, and the Block Museum of Art, among others. His work has been featured in Aperture, The New York Times, Vogue, and the Financial Times Magazine. His first monograph, documenting thirteen years of collaborative portraiture across Indonesia, rural Oregon, and Chicago, is in development.
Suryajaya holds a BFA in Creative Photography from California State University, Fullerton and an MFA in Photography from the School of the Art Institute of Chicago.
Leonard Suryajaya uses photography to test the boundaries of intimacy and family. Working exclusively in analog 4×5 large-format photography alongside collage, video, installation, and public art, he makes work in which the everyday is layered with histories, meanings, and potential. In elaborately staged photographs bursting with competing patterns and colors, Leonard creates absurd but affectionate tableaux featuring his family and community. Enlisting his loved ones into his photographic project, he encourages ever more wild combinations and poses as means for them to perform their loyalty. The results are photographs that are tender and critical, bound up as they are with the struggles of collective authority and self-identity.
Many of Leonard's investigations are rooted in the particularity of his upbringing as an Indonesian citizen of Chinese descent, as a Buddhist educated in Christian schools in a Muslim-majority country, and as someone who departed from his family and his culture's definitions of love and family. Leonard explores these tensions in the everyday interaction, in the chance juxtaposition of culturally coded objects, and in the disruptions stirred by queer relations. Naturalized as an American citizen in 2025, he has carried the practice across that threshold, from his relatives in Indonesia to his in-laws in rural Oregon, then to chosen households and civic spaces in Chicago, and now to Tulsa.
His works perform the ways in which life is soaked not just with one's own emotional connections but larger, external histories of exile, religion, citizenship, duty, and belonging. His works cumulatively establish narratives, and he combines images with collage, and with videos that document family histories, that play out fantasies, that test group dynamics, or that use the format of the interview to turn his sitters' gaze back upon his role as artist and facilitator. In all of these, we feel the push and pull of allegiance and autonomy in every odd detail that his works retain as reminders.