Leonard Suryajaya

Leonard Suryajaya Visual Artist Based in Chicago

In the topic of sharing our moms, here’s mine 🌷🌻🪷🌺💐🌹Happy Mommy’s day ❤️
11/05/2026

In the topic of sharing our moms, here’s mine 🌷🌻🪷🌺💐🌹Happy Mommy’s day ❤️

I’m so blessed to receive 2026 CENTER Project Development Grant for Parting Gift.When I started making photographs with ...
08/05/2026

I’m so blessed to receive 2026 CENTER Project Development Grant for Parting Gift.

When I started making photographs with my family, it was a way to stay connected across distance. To share what I was learning in America. To visualize a culture that had no visual language for itself yet. I didn’t know I was building a life’s work. I was just trying to stay close to people I loved from far away.

I’m sitting with this grant now after two deaths that gave clarity to my purpose and direction. What began as connection became something larger. A practice. A philosophy. A record of what it costs and what it means to choose family despite migration, geography, politics, and belief systems that pull people apart.

CENTER’s juror, Shana Lopes, Assistant Curator of Photography at SFMOMA, wrote that the work “feels alive” — that even when it touches loss, it holds onto a buoyant energy that refuses to be contained. I am still sitting with that too.

There have been moments when I questioned my choice to stay with the 4x5 process. It is slow. It is expensive. It is unforgiving. Every frame is a commitment made before you know the result. In an age of instant images and AI generation, it is an almost stubborn act of faith in craft, in chemistry, in the people standing in front of the camera trusting you to get it right. This grant goes directly into sustaining that. Film acquisition, development, drum scanning, labor and materials for new large format tableaux. It makes it possible to keep choosing this process.

Thank you to and to for seeing this project and believing it deserves to exist fully.

I also want to acknowledge the . As I’ve spent these past few months going back and forth between Chicago and Tulsa, the fellowship has supported me in facing what needed facing. Sitting with myself and my work long enough to find clarity. That clarity made this possible too.

Family is work I choose to practice. I intend to bring it all the way through.

Essential Oil Auntie, 2026She had an essential oil for every symptom you could possibly have.When she left, I never thou...
05/05/2026

Essential Oil Auntie, 2026

She had an essential oil for every symptom you could possibly have.

When she left, I never thought to ask who should keep them. I could only ask her sisters to gather around what she left behind and celebrate her.

I built a career photographing my family. Every shoot is a test and a confirmation of the bond we share. Working against...
24/04/2026

I built a career photographing my family. Every shoot is a test and a confirmation of the bond we share. Working against the backdrop of a hometown that rejects me, a country whose laws pick families apart, my work is proof that the bond of family is worth fighting for anyway.

My aunt was not a hero or a villain. She was a single mom to three daughters. Divorced. Cancer took her life. She didn’t fit the ideal image of a woman where I come from. But she had nothing but love and acceptance for me. I am honored to have had her in my life.

The hardest part of looking through these photographs is being reminded of who I was when I made each one. Unsure. Unformed. Then slowly becoming something. Some of these images I never shared because they weren’t good enough technically or aesthetically.

None of that matters now. She was always there.

I love you ie mei mei

23/04/2026

I’ve photographed headshots, weddings, avant garde portraiture. I’ve shown in galleries, public spaces, newspapers, magazines.

None of it prepared me for this.

Seeing my photo used as a death photo does something I haven’t yet fully figured out. I took this portrait of my aunt and my cousins not knowing it would become the last image people would carry of her. To advertise her passing.

Could I have done better? Should I have done more? How does this inform my practice?

It’s been 100 days since her passing. A special time for family to pray and pay their respects. I’m doing this from afar.

I’m practicing how to process loss as a gift. It feels like free floating in zero gravity heading into a portal. I don’t know what’s on the other side. But I’m equipped. Suit on. Oxygen mask on. I know I won’t die from this. But I have to face it and fight through the discomfort to get there.

🙂‍↕️🥰 I’ve been having some clarifying thoughts about Parting Gift. Yes it’s about parting, but it’s also about gifting....
20/04/2026

🙂‍↕️🥰 I’ve been having some clarifying thoughts about Parting Gift. Yes it’s about parting, but it’s also about gifting. When I first started the project, I was interested in charting the loss from migration, especially after not being able to leave America for five years due to immigration and covid. I didn’t know deaths were going to add to the equation.

So now I’m sitting with the task of transforming loss into gifts.

I don’t want to be the boy who cries wolf. I don’t want to turn bitter either, sitting with work I’ve been developing and then suddenly having to maneuver and perform a major overhaul without giving up. That’s why I arrive at a simple question: how can my work be a gift? How can I cash in on my suffering and turn it around?

Wow, the capitalist mindset has definitely seeped into my brain.

But what’s the point of expressing suffering if I personally can’t get the benefit of it. And I don’t want it to be self-serving either. The expression of suffering has to also benefit others.

That’s very socialist of me.

So yeah. This photo is how I answered that.

Margot holds court. Lucinda is still small enough to be carried. Their mother is Australian. Their father is my partner’s cousin. They live in McMinnville, Oregon. Passports on the steps. I have been doing a lot of accounting lately. Of what remains and what doesn’t. And then I look at this image and remember that life keeps moving. Children keep arriving. Families keep forming across borders, across all the paperwork that decides who belongs where.

Parting Gift is fundamentally a project about belonging. About the families we are born into, the families we build, and everything we lost and found in between. Let me sit with that and keep unfolding.

19/04/2026

Taking a self portrait with your family on analog film is like riding a bike across a narrow beam over muddy water.

Thrilling. With a splash of stress.

Working Notes I made this photograph at a local Buddhist temple in Medan in 2024. These are my family and relatives. My ...
17/04/2026

Working Notes

I made this photograph at a local Buddhist temple in Medan in 2024. These are my family and relatives. My immediate family, my aunts, my uncle, and my cousins.

This is also a self portrait. I am the figure in the front left, holding the shutter release.

The image is built around two references held together. The Bodhisattva of a thousand heads and a thousand arms. A figure of boundless compassion. A figure that transcends gender. A figure that faces every direction at once because suffering comes from every direction. And tari piring. The Indonesian plate dance. Which is why everyone is holding plates.

The Chinese lion dance costumes in the foreground are not decoration. I am Chinese Indonesian. These two traditions are both mine. They don’t always sit easily together. I put them in the same frame because that tension is part of what I am.

The women are centered. My sister, pregnant, at the middle. The men are supporting actors. The American are on the ground in front of them, bowing.

I wanted to celebrate my family. Especially my sister and the new bloodline she was carrying.

I’ve been talking a lot about the sappy sad stuff. But what I need to remember is that I’m celebrating a complex life with its layered ingredients. I’m the craftsman. The chef making a harmonious dish out of competing pungent elements.

Does it taste better when you trust your chef?

I’m finally ready to share this photograph from 2024.Since making it, I’ve lost two people in this frame.My nephew Kai, ...
15/04/2026

I’m finally ready to share this photograph from 2024.

Since making it, I’ve lost two people in this frame.
My nephew Kai, who I never met and only photographed in anticipation of his arrival.
And my aunt, who I had been photographing for over a decade as she moved through illness.

Sudden loss and slow loss.
Two different weights held in the same image.

For a long time, I couldn’t look at these photographs.
I was stuck. Helpless. Insecure. Angry. Catatonic. Uninspired. Heavy with sorrow.

And I keep coming back to this thought.
If their deaths continue to pull me down, then I am admitting that their existence pulled me down too.
That includes the joy, the life, and the memories they gave me.
I know that isn’t true. But grief can make it feel that way.

I hate that I disappeared into that place.

What’s changed is that I’ve found a way to move with it.
An outlet. The courage to share.
The love and support I’ve been receiving has pulled me back into the world.

I feel it now. Energy. Urgency. A need to celebrate them fully.

To make work from this.
To use loss as raw material and push it into something else. Something that can hold more than pain.

I’m ready to go all the way into this.
To process it fully. To push past that feeling of being stuck.

Maybe loss can become hospitable first.
Then, eventually, something we can celebrate.

I always wished I had an uncle who knew the way.Someone who had already moved countries alone and survived it. Who had b...
13/04/2026

I always wished I had an uncle who knew the way.

Someone who had already moved countries alone and survived it. Who had built a working art practice without a blueprint. Who had figured out how to be gay and still choose family. Not because the acceptance was complete, but because harmony was worth the sacrifice, and the sacrifice became its own form of love.

Nobody showed me how to do any of it. I found the way, but I found it alone.

When my sister told me she was pregnant, I felt joy. And then almost immediately I felt the weight settle at the back of my neck. I was going to be an uncle, oceans away, and I wanted to be worthy of it.

So I took inventory. Not of the version of myself I performed for the world, but the real one. The one who still flinched at the slight pause in someone’s face when they tried to comprehend him. The one who was still a highlighter walking through black and white, red and blue ink. I had never needed to face that with purpose or urgency.

Until Kai.

I picked up my camera. I brought my family into it. Not to document, but to rehearse. Different modes of being, layered carefully, like we were all learning a new language together. I was trying to build a universe I could one day hand to him.

He gave me clarity I hadn’t felt in years. He brought my family together around creativity and love in ways I hadn’t known how to ask for. I have proof. Photographs, hours of them, a body of work built from the anticipation of a person who hadn’t yet arrived.

I never got to be that uncle to him.

But I built the person anyway.

Although I can’t do it for Kai, I can be it to other people. Perhaps that’s the point.

If you are the one who found the way alone. Who moved countries without a guide, who built a practice without a blueprint, who chose a life your culture had no language for. Maybe you needed an uncle too.

Maybe that’s who I’m becoming. For him. Because of him. Beyond him.

The Living Art of Dying — 01

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