Simon Leung embarked on a 21st-century exploration of the writing, life, and legacy of Edgar Allan Poe that has resulted in the video POE. The first segment locates Poe in New York, paralleling his hardships in the 1840’s with contemporary pressures of gentrification and preservation that subsequently took place at the sites of his former residences. It features the pioneering choreographer and filmmaker Yvonne Rainer who moves between the former Poe House in Greenwich Village and the Poe Cottage in the Bronx. She begins at 85 West 3rd Street, where Poe lived from 1845 – 1846, soon after “The Raven” was published and made Poe a national literary celebrity. It was the setting of recent controversy when the structure was demolished in 2001 to make way for a New York University Law School building. As a compromise, the house’s façade was moved and reconstructed as part of the new building. Conversely, Poe’s last home was saved in 1895 by the Shakespeare Society’s campaign and moved to its current location in 1913 on the Grand Concourse and East Kingsbridge Road.

The second segment is filmed in Poland, using 19th-century architectural spaces in the city of Warsaw as a setting for an interpretation of several Poe works—“The Black Cat,” “The Tell-Tale Heart,” and “The Raven.” Writer, and sometimes performer Warren Niesluchowski plays a Poe character set in house on a street named for “the raven,” while the soundtrack builds toward an allusion to the historical “hauntings” of Poland. The images in this section highlight the conventional associations that a general audience may have with Poe, and are, at the same time, commentary on the construction of the gothic conventions that verge on camp.

The third segment is filmed in Southern California, and features Gregory Poe (a distant relative of E. A. Poe) and a cast of Leung’s students from the University of California, Irvine. Gregory Poe’s familial recollections serve as an introduction to Leung’s retelling of Poe’s novel The Narrative of Arthur Gordon Pym of Nantucket. Pym’s adventure tale of butchery, cannibalism, shipwreck, and discovery of alien and “incomprehensible” signs and indigenous peoples hostile to Europeans and North Americans intruders serves as an allegory for the current US involvement in Iraq. In his expansive interpretation of Poe, Leung has been guided by Robert Smithson’s reading of Arthur Gordon Pym suggesting the novel as a model for the site/nonsite dialectic.

Simon Leung’s work is project-based and very often collaborative such as Proposal for The Side of the Mountain, an opera/film/sculpture, written in collaboration with composer Michael Webster), that was presented at the Santa Monica Museum of Art in 2002. He has exhibited in New York in the Whitney Biennial 1993, The Whitney Museum of American Art; the Museum of Modern Art, New York; PS1 Museum, and Pat Hearn Gallery; and internationally the Venice Biennale in 2003, Venice, Italy; NGBK, Berlin, Germany; the Kunstahlle Fredericianum, Kassel, Germany; the MIT List Visual Arts Center, Cambridge, MA; the Art Institute of Chicago, Chicago, IL; and the Museum of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles, CA. He earned his BA from the University of California, Los Angeles, and attended the Whitney Museum Independent Study Program.

POE, is sponsored by a grant from the University of California Institute for Research in the Arts.

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At every step we took inland the conviction forced itself upon us that were in a country differing essentially from any hitherto visited by civilized men. We saw nothing with which we had been formerly conversant. The trees resembled no growth of either the torrid, the temperate, or the northern frigid zones, and were altogether unlike those of the lower southern latitudes we had already traversed. The very rocks were novel in their mass, their colour, and their stratification; and the streams themselves, utterly incredible as it may appear, had so little in common with those of other climates, that we were scrupulous of tasting them, and indeed, had difficulty in bringing ourselves to believe that their quantities were purely those of nature. At a small brook which crossed our path (the first we had reached) Too-wit and his attendants halted to drink. On account of the singular character of the water, we refused to taste it, supposing it to be polluted; and it was not until some time afterward we came to understand that such was the appearance of the streams throughout the whole group.

- Edgar Allan Poe, The Narrative of Arthur Gordon Pym of Nantucket