Ghislaine Leung articulates an art practice, a life, and the necessity to act within a system of limitations. As an artist how can you get out of the hiding position? Her blocks are taken as raw material. To make art is to understand how you are, notice your prejudices and assumptions about value and acknowledge your hand in an unequal world, to recognise how you institute yourself while letting go of the outcome of work. Value is often internalised and mistaken as a positive quality: why does one seek again and again to exploit oneself? Poetic and close up, to the child and to the world, there is proximity without distance. Embodied, deep, with many entry points for the reader, 'Bosses' is Leung's matrix of motherhood, authorship, self-employment, dependency, love and action.
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, her
To make art is to unders