The Collage Artist Who Nearly Died at 36

“I like graphics that aren’t too perfect. I studied graphic design, and whenever I did clean vector artwork, it just didn’t feel right.”

Ripping it up

Chico Leong describes his work simply. “It’s just collecting images, like magazines, and sticking them down and trying to create a different kind of image.”

He came to it sideways. Chico studied graphic design, but the clean, exact work it asked of him never sat right. So he started messing around: ripping up paper, scrunching it, cutting out letters and ripping those too, then scanning everything in. Those scans became t-shirt graphics. The rough edges were the point.

A streetwear dude

He never set out to be an artist. For a long time he called himself a graphic artist instead, and it took him years to use the other word. “Especially cuz I wasn’t painting and doing the traditional kind of stuff,” he told me.

What he was, in his words, was “a streetwear dude”. He had built a clothing brand with his brother, and he thought he’d be in that game forever.

2020

In 2020, during COVID, Chico woke up with a really bad headache. Then, all of a sudden, the left side of his body wasn’t working.

“I knew I was having a stroke,” he said, “but I was in denial.” His plan was to sleep it off. His housemate didn’t think that was a good idea, and Chico went to emergency instead. A scan found bleeding on his brain. He was in hospital for two or three weeks.

The doctors were straight with him. He could die during the operation, and the operation was a week away. “So I was kind of thinking, ‘Damn, am I going to die in a week?’”

“It was almost like I was taking life for granted until then.”

The things he enjoyed

With that week in front of him, Chico thought about the things he really enjoyed and wanted to do. Making collages was one of them.

He came out the other side. He walked away from the clothing brand and went all in on collage. He calls the whole thing a wake-up call. There is no brief now, and no client.

These days the studio is where he goes to be on his own. “I’m a bit of a solo dude,” he said, “so coming in here and creating things by myself, just with no one around, no one to tell me what to do. It’s therapeutic.”

The feeling, not the meaning

The work pulls from street culture and graphic design, the two worlds he came up in. Chico is half Chinese, and he wanted to bring an Asian aesthetic into it too. On the table while we filmed was a sheet of black and white type, his name repeated through it, with torn eyes pressed in by hand.

Ask him what a piece means, though, and he won’t dress it up. “The pieces themselves don’t have a really deep meaning,” he said. “It’s more the feeling for me when I’m creating something. It calms me down. It helps with my anxiety.”

“It’s more meaningful for me creating these pieces than the meaning they have behind these pieces.”

No suit

He never wanted the traditional path: do well in high school, go to uni, get a degree, climb the ladder. He made himself a promise about that when he was really young, and he has kept it.

“I said to myself, ‘I’ll never wear a suit to work,’” he told me. “And I’ve never worn a suit to work.”