Mona Leau (b. 1998) is a contemporary artist based in the United States whose practice centers on photography as a method of inquiry into truth, perception, and invisible structures shaping contemporary reality. Working across photography, collage, archives, and interdisciplinary research, she explores the relationships between waves and resonance, natural laws and time, social memory and individual experience. By bridging the scale of the cosmos with intimate personal perception, her work seeks to construct a visual language through which the unseen may be sensed and approached.
Mona’s engagement with photography began as a fundamental questioning of the medium itself. While studying at the California Institute of the Arts (CalArts) under Sharon Lockhart, she developed a rigorous photographic foundation while continuously asking, What is photography capable of? In 2020, during the global pandemic, she created the collage work The Wall: Journal of Times, assembling fragments of crisis, misinformation, and collective anxiety. Yet amid global collapse, she experienced a profound sense of artistic insufficiency—an awareness that representation alone could not fully respond to the depth of lived reality. This moment marked a decisive shift in her practice, prompting her to move beyond expression toward a deeper investigation of truth.
Seeking to understand art within broader social systems, Mona pursued a master’s degree in Arts Administration at Boston University. This period reshaped her understanding of art not as isolated authorship, but as a form of collective, relational labor embedded in institutions, communities, and infrastructures. Under the encouragement of her advisor Lauren O’Neal, she founded the Chinese Artists in America Network (CAAN), a platform supporting diasporic artists through connection, dialogue, and collaboration. The network has since connected over one hundred artists worldwide and expanded from online exchanges to offline initiatives. This experience bridged her artistic practice with organizational work, restoring a sense of continuity between creation, responsibility, and social engagement.
Returning to her personal artistic practice, Mona encountered a profound internal transformation. Living between China and the United States for nearly a decade, she became acutely aware of cultural displacement, political tension, and the tightening of ideological control. As a diasporic subject, she experienced distance not only geographically, but perceptually—between lived experience and dominant narratives. This condition led her to move away from conventional documentary photography toward a more philosophical and perceptual approach, treating photography as an extension of consciousness rather than a tool of observation.
From this shift emerged two interconnected conceptual frameworks that continue to guide her work: “Photography of Waves” and “Photography of the Dao.”
“Photography of Waves” is grounded in the belief that all photography is fundamentally a manifestation of waves—light waves, data flows, memory traces, emotional vibrations. Mona conceives of images as carriers of wave values capable of resonating across time and space, allowing viewers to encounter photography not only visually but sensorially and temporally.
“Photography of the Dao,” informed by Dao De Jing, emphasizes awareness (awakening) over mere sight. Rather than positioning subject and object in opposition, Mona explores photography as a system in which natural order, social structure, and individual perception coexist in continuous flux, challenging conventional binaries of subjectivity and objectivity.
Guided by these frameworks, Mona has developed the ongoing series Realm of Suchness, alongside a number of deeply personal projects. Works such as My Mother and I (2023) and One Hundred Me (2024) approach identity through psychological inquiry, examining how the self is shaped, fractured, and reconstructed through relationships, cultural translation, and collective memory. Her collaborative multimedia project How to Exhibit Utility Poles, created with peers from CalArts, employs archival research, scale models, and spatial installation to interrogate the power dynamics embedded in seemingly neutral infrastructures. Across these works, Mona examines how political systems and historical forces quietly permeate everyday life.
Mona Leau’s practice unfolds as an inward yet expansive investigation of contemporary existence. She approaches photography as a perceptual laboratory—one that tests whether images can still function as instruments of connection between the individual and the world, between finite human experience and larger cosmic order. Rather than offering definitive conclusions, her work sustains a state of resonance, inviting viewers into a shared process of sensing, questioning, and reattuning to reality.
Mona Leau (b. 1998) is a contemporary photographer based in the United States, working primarily with photography. She graduated from the California Institute of the Arts with a Bachelor of Fine Arts in Photography, and received a Master of Arts in Art Administration from Boston University. Her practice investigates how “truth” is perceived, mediated, and reconfigured through images, with a particular focus on waves, time, natural laws, and the relationship between individual experience and larger social structures. Shaped by her long-term experience living between China and the U.S., Mona gradually shifted from conventional documentary approaches toward a more philosophical mode of image-making. She has developed the concepts of “Photography of Waves” and “Photography of the Dao,” treating photography as a field of perception and resonance rather than representation. Through personal narratives, archival research, and interdisciplinary methods, her work examines identity, memory, and the subtle ways political and social forces shape everyday life, offering an inward yet expansive approach to contemporary photographic practice. Her works have been exhibited internationally in Three Shadows Photography Art Centre, Carriage Trade Gallery NYC, Chengdu Contemporary Image Museum， Shenzhen Artron Art Center, Wuhan Photography Art Centre and others.
2021 - 2023 Boston University - Master of Science in Art Administration
2018 - 2021 California Institute of the Arts - Bachelor of Arts in Photography and Media
2017 - 2018 University of Vermont - Psychology and Studio Arts