Leung Mee-ping began her art education in 1983 at the École nationale supérieure des Beaux-Arts in Paris. Upon earning a BFA in 1991, she spent a year as an exchange student at Universitat de Barcelona’s Faculty of Fine Arts from 1991 to 1992. After returning to Hong Kong in 1994, her first solo exhibition of mixed-media work was held at the Fringe Club, a non-profit arts organisation located in the Central district of Hong Kong. In 1996, she co-founded Para Site, Hong Kong’s leading contemporary art centre dedicated to producing exhibitions, publications and educational materials to promote connections between art and society – both locally and internationally. In 1998, she moved to the United States and earned an MFA from the California Institute of the Arts in 2000. She then returned to Hong Kong to obtain a Ph.D. in Cultural Studies from the Chinese University of Hong Kong, graduating in 2009. Since 2018 she has been Associate Professor at the Academy of Visual Arts at the Hong Kong Baptist University.

In 1991, she began working on Elsewhere, a mixed media installation comprised of 10,000 tea bags sewn together by hand. The work was inspired by a close friend’s passing and demonstrates her keen interest in expressing the human condition through memory and community. Her later works, such as I Miss Fanta (2012), further develop these initial influences but also consider the effects of globalisation on cultural heritage and collective memory. This work is made of neon Coca-Cola, Sprite and Fanta signs that were once displayed on the Macau Coca-Cola Factory in the popular shopping district of Avenida de Almedia Riberio. Leung’s site-specific public installation, which features the discarded Coca-Cola and Sprite signage in Yau Ma Tei Park in Hong Kong, symbolises the effects of urban revitalisation, or gentrification, on sites of cultural heritage.

The installation Sound of Silence (2021) augments the themes of community and belonging through its medium. A number of small, automated hammering devices are placed among stacks of tiles on the floor. Programmed by a timer, the devices tap randomly on the tiles, creating sounds. In this work, the tiles, collected from the roofs of old houses, illustrate the idea of protection, as they were once fixed to a building that provided rest and shelter. The off-beat sounds produced by the tapping represent an audio-visual manifestation of broken thoughts. Her works are issue-based, emphasising concern about the human condition and the relationship between community and globalisation.

Leung’s works have been collected by prominent museums across the world. Most notably, the White Rabbit Gallery in Australia, the NUS Museum in Singapore, École nationale superieure des Beaux-Arts in France, M+ in Hong Kong and the National Museum South Branch in Taiwan.