In March 2026, The Block Museum Student Associates (BMSAs) had the privilege of visiting the Chicago studio of artist Leonard Suryajaya, a longtime friend and collaborator of The Block Museum. The visit offered students a rare opportunity to engage directly with an artist’s working environment and creative process. Suryajaya welcomed the group into both his studio and his story, speaking candidly about the relationship between his practice and his experiences of immigration, family, and cultural identity. Sam Habashy (Journalism and International Studies, 2026) shares her takeaways from the afternoon

 Our BMSA visit to Leonard Suryajaya’s studio offered beautiful insight into the artistic process and the slices of life we rarely get to see when we encounter art, rather than the artist. The studio was bright, with the natural light streaming onto the maximalist, colorful portraits that decorated the white walls. It’s rare we get to witness the vulnerable slices of life that lie behind artworks, because we’re usually handed the finished, final piece, not the years of living, risk, and negotiation that make it possible. During our visit, Suryajaya invited us not only into his studio and space but also into his story.

“I grew up with a lot of clutter,” he explained, and that insight made the fullness in his photographic images feel less like chaos and more intentional. Growing up in Indonesia, a Muslim-majority country where so much visual culture is expressed through geometric shapes, Suryajaya’s dense patterning is a callback to the visual language of his homeland rather than a purely stylistic choice. As he spoke about immigrating to America and leaving home for good, the colorful chaos started to read like a way of holding on to everything that paperwork often tries to sever. 

“I’m a one-year-old American! I find it so liberating to be able to use art to bring all of the elements of me together,” he said. His work considers how to honor his roots without being defined by them.

A physical extension of him, his studio weaves together stories of his childhood, his queerness, and his current life in Chicago. His partner, Peter, is both part of his life and often in his photographs (see Quarantine Blues at the Block Museum!), origami-ed into the same visual universe as everyone else in his world. Suryajaya talked about wanting to connect his white family, his Asian family, and his Chicago family, and how much deliberate work it takes to link all those dots. For him, paying attention to where each of those relationships has developed and grown is part of the practice, and it makes the effort of holding them together through his art feel worth it.

For the last ten years, Suryajaya has continued to return to a natural muse: his family. His parents, aunts, uncles, cousins, and in-laws have grown accustomed to him with a camera attached to his hip and them in the lens. This practice has allowed art to fill in when words sometimes couldn’t. The photographs, though posed, feel like dropping in on an unfolding conversation where love, tension, inside jokes, and unspoken realities are visible all at once. “I am an artist, and I want my work to speak to what I think,” he said, “but I have a familial relationship that has hindered me from doing so, while also understanding the consequences of subjecting my family to my work.”

Suryajaya loves making his work modular. If he needs to shoot in the studio, he can roll everything out, set up lights, and transform the room into a full photo studio; at other times, he uses it primarily as a producing space where he plans and builds his projects. Over time, he has shaped his career so that he can travel anywhere in the world to make photographs, turning people’s houses, museums, and temporary locations into extensions of his studio rather than relying on a single permanent site. He currently travels between Chicago and Tulsa, Oklahoma to complete the Tulsa Artist Fellowship. His images may read as studio photographs, but for him, the “studio” is wherever he can gather people, props, and light into the frame, and that mobility is exactly what he hopes his practice will continue to allow. “I’m like the new shiny object in Tulsa.”

What’s stuck with me is that all of these pieces of Suryajaya, from citizenship and family to queerness, country, and career, are not sequential chapters but overlapping layers he keeps arranging and rearranging. His art holds the tired, the true, the tranquil, the terror, the triumph, the titillating, the turns that everyday life can easily smooth over into routine.

2025-2026 BMSA’s visit Leonard Suryajay’s studio.