Unpacking postmodernity

Bangkok Post

6 days ago

Singaporean artist Heman Chong is a bricoleur. He does not care about the purity of a system and uses materials at hand for creation without regard to their original purpose. It comes as no surprise then his solo exhibition's title declares such provisionality -- "This Is A Dynamic List And May Never Be Able To Satisfy Particular Standards For Completeness."
Appropriated from a disclaimer on Wikipedia, this unwieldy string of words signals a postmodern bent in his oeuvre. Chong grapples with the instability -- and loss -- of truth in a digital age.
Running at the Singapore Art Museum, Chong's first exhibition features 51 works from the early 2000s to present, including six new commissions, charting the prolific course of his conceptualism against the rise of social media. He moves fluidly between photography, installation, performance and painting. At the core of his practice is an interrogation of infrastructures that underpin contemporary life.
Chong challenges the common view that truth -- a product of objective, scientific inquiry -- is universal. As suggested by the playful title, some of his artworks express tendency towards reflexivity. In The Straits Times, Friday, September 27, 2013, Cover, he uses repetition and overlap to create a palimpsest of a daily newspaper sheet.
The intentional glitch draws attention to its own status as something artificially constructed, highlighting that the media are ideologically mired in their service. In Foreign Affairs #106, he arranged photos of embassy back doors encountered during his trips, which evoke the omnipresence of surveillance technology that tracks, governs and commodifies everyday life.
When language (signifier) no longer points to reality (signified), there are only surfaces, without depth. As Fredric Jameson puts it: "The past as 'referent' finds itself gradually bracketed and then effaced altogether, leaving us with nothing but texts."
In Works On Paper #2: Prospectus, Chong attempts to revive a novel from the computer graveyard after a hasty deletion. In 2006, he wrote a 200-page book, Prospectus, which revolves around an artist accused of plagiarising a younger artist's novel also titled Prospectus (very metafictional).
Frustrated, Chong deleted the novel only to recover just 239 words in 2024. Bits and pieces of his forever-lost work in English, with a translation to Mandarin via Google Translate, are presented out of context. There are only signifiers, with no signifieds.
In Secrets And Lies (The Impossibility Of Reconstitutions), Chong presents mountains of individual lines of literary text. He put 326 espionage novels in a paper shredder, making it impossible to identify their origins. Developed in conjunction with Romanticism, modern literature comes to express human creativity in the face of industrialisation.
As two centuries go by, it is razed to rubble. Technology necessitates a shift in the status of creative works from divine genius to content in a no-man's land.
In Simple Sabotage, Chong presents an avalanche of fluorescent text on a black screen that evokes information overload in the hyper-networked digital age.
It is a reproduction of a declassified wartime guide by the US Office of Strategic Services that describes tactics for undermining the Axis, but he repurposes it for a manual on hindrance to productivity in the workplace. His choice of material and display rejects the distinction between high and low culture.
As universal truth is shown to be illusory, Chong rejects grand narratives and turns to small practices and local events. Stacks, for example, is an installation of his annual sculptural works, each conceived from everyday objects he used in the preceding year, like books and glasses. He celebrates the everyday rather than the big moment of one's life.
Meanwhile, Perimeter Walk features 550 postcard photos showing Chong's exploration of Singapore's borders. As a suburban flaneur, he challenges the slick image of the island city state, documenting life at its fringes, such as cats, tents and workers resting by the roadside, and lush vegetation. His installation doubles as a pop-up store where visitors can purchase the postcards, facilitating the exchange and circulation of cultural objects.
In the same way, Calendars (2020-2096) is a collection of 1,001 images of empty public spaces in Singapore, such as airports, schools and apartments, that Chong photographed from 2004 to 2010. Devoid of human presence, the work evokes the disturbing void of the pandemic lockdown.
Presented as calendar pages of a fictional tomorrow from 2020-2096, his work disrupts the notion of progress and linear time, inviting viewers to speculate a dystopian future out of the real past. Because mini-narratives are provisional, contingent and temporary, Chong's artworks make no claim to permanent truth.
In 106B Depot Road Singapore 102106, he collaborates with Jiehao Lau to reconstruct public housing, an expression of Singapore's modernity, from memory rather than architectural plans to counterbalance order and rationality. 106B Depot Road is the address of Chong's former home, where he lived and worked for 16 years.
While most of his works are playful, a few lament the meaninglessness of contemporary life. In Monument To The People We've Conveniently Forgotten (I Hate You), he presents thousands of blacked-out name cards that engulf the floor, inviting visitors to tread on the superficial nature of human connections in the digital age. Like friends on social media, these business cards are just signifiers, with no signified deeper relationships.
As a bricoleur, Chong improvises an antidote from unrealised potential. In collaboration with Renée Staal, he asks the public to contribute to a social sculpture, The Library Of Unread Books. It imagines the transition of unused items from private property to a common pool, where individuals can share resources and build rapport in silence through the medium of books.
"This Is A Dynamic List And May Never Be Able To Satisfy Particular Standards For Completeness" is running until Aug 17 at Singapore Art Museum. Visit singaporeartmuseum.sg.