Latest news with #HemanChong
Forbes
3 days ago
- Entertainment
- Forbes
Artist Heman Chong Finds Meaning In The Unfinished
Heman Chong, The Library of Unread Books, 2016-Present. Installation view of Serpentine Pavilion 2024, Archipelagic Void, designed by Minsuk Cho, Mass Studies Photo Heman Chong Singaporean artist Heman Chong has built a compelling, unconventional practice that spans painting, writing, performance, installation and what he calls 'situations'. Known for his sharp wit, conceptual rigor and fascination with systems of language, politics and infrastructure, his work often explores the gaps between information and interpretation, presence and absence. He represented Singapore at the 2003 Venice Biennale and recently exhibited 'The Library of Unread Books', a roving public reference library composed entirely of unread books donated by individuals that reflects the surplus of knowledge in contemporary life, at the Serpentine Pavilion in London in 2024. With his first major survey show, 'This is a dynamic list and may never be able to satisfy particular standards for completeness', now on view at the Singapore Art Museum until August 17, 2025, he reflects on over two decades of restless experimentation and invites us to embrace the incomplete, the overlooked and the unresolved. Your Singapore Art Museum exhibition title 'This is a dynamic list and may never be able to satisfy particular standards for completeness' is taken from Wikipedia's terms and conditions. What about the impermanence and incompleteness of digital information resonates with your practice? The title of this survey is itself an artwork. I borrowed the phrase from Wikipedia, where it appears on list pages. I feel a connection to it because many of the objects that interest me seem to constantly shift in meaning. Whether we like to accept it or not, the fact is everything around us is constantly changing on an atomic level. Every moment is different from the next. We can never recreate a moment in time because it is just physically impossible. I think we like to think about stability and consistency and how we all like to feel safe in that cocoon of fiction, but unfortunately, life is often made up of all these different things thrown at us and I've always felt, quoting a beautiful title from a book by Joan Didion, to 'play it as it lays'. Installation view of Heman Chong's Monument to the people we've conveniently forgotten (I hate you), 2008, as part of the exhibition "This is a dynamic list and may never be able to satisfy particular standards for completeness" at Singapore Art Museum at Tanjong Pagar Distripark Photo courtesy of Singapore Art Museum Your exhibition is framed around nine thematic rooms. How did you decide on these themes, and what kind of journey do you hope visitors will experience as they move through the space? The nine parts of this exhibition form a constellation of a large part of myself, so in fact, the exhibition layout is somewhat autobiographical. The parts are: Words, Whispers, Ghosts, Journeys, Futures, Findings, Infrastructures, Surfaces and Endings. To be honest, I've never expected anything from the audience and they are free to experience whatever they would when they encounter my work. For your six new commissions in this exhibition, what was the starting point for them? Were they conceptually linked to your earlier projects or did they represent a new departure? Everything that I've ever made has a formal or sometimes emotional relationship to each other. One project spills into the other. Everything is a mess and I like this messy way of working. It is difficult to think of imaginary beginnings or ends for each of my works because, as the title of the exhibition would suggest, I am very invested in open-endedness and incomplete things. Installation view of Heman Chong's Calendars (2020-2096), 2004-2010, as part of the exhibition "This is a dynamic list and may never be able to satisfy particular standards for completeness" at Singapore Art Museum at Tanjong Pagar Distripark Photo courtesy of Singapore Art Museum What do you feel is the role of the artist in society? What do you hope to achieve or what message do you hope to convey through your art at the end of the day? I view my role as an artist as a privileged individual whose job is to, hopefully, think differently from the norm. By offering alternative perspectives, I hope to create more open and meaningful spaces in our society to engage with complex topics such as inequality, identity, esthetics, existential questions and community. After this survey exhibition, what new projects or exhibitions are you working on? Are there new directions or themes you're eager to explore next? I am working on many projects at the moment. The first is a book that will be published by the wonderful Ivory Press in Madrid. The second is a new temporary sculpture for the Middelheim Museum in Antwerp that will be installed for a year in their beautiful outdoor gardens. I am also the artist in residence this summer at the Asia Art Archive in Hong Kong, where I will dedicate my time to thinking about a show curated by Hou Hanru at Tai Kwun Contemporary about my favorite artist, On Kawara. I am also working on a long-term publishing project with a bookshop called Page Not Found in The Hague that will become a dispersed exhibition in The Netherlands. Finally, my work is included in the 30th anniversary show at the Museum of Contemporary Art Tokyo this autumn. I am working on many other solo shows, but I am not allowed to discuss any details about them right now, so stay tuned!
Bangkok Post
08-07-2025
- Entertainment
- Bangkok Post
Unpacking postmodernity
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
Straits Times
31-05-2025
- Entertainment
- Straits Times
TBR (To Be Read): In the digital age, books have become art and artefacts
Shredded books at Heman Chong's exhibition This Is A Dynamic List And May Never Be Able To Satisfy Particular Standards For Completeness at the Singapore Art Museum. ST PHOTO: KELVIN CHNG SINGAPORE – In 1855, French graphic artist and illustrator Gustave Dore conceived of a quixotic plan to publish large, expensive folio editions of 'all the masterpieces in literature'. His unique selling point: They would be richly illustrated with his romanticist sketches. The language of his publishers' rejection is strikingly contemporary. Join ST's Telegram channel and get the latest breaking news delivered to you.
Business Times
15-05-2025
- Entertainment
- Business Times
Heman Chong at SAM: Monuments to memory and forgetting
[SINGAPORE] Heman Chong, Singapore's quintessential conceptual artist, finally gets the career look-back he deserves at the Singapore Art Museum (SAM). But instead of mounting a typical retrospective, he has given us a characteristically strange and open-ended interrogation into what we choose to remember, what we choose to forget, and the absurdities of living in a hyper-networked world that remembers everything and nothing at once. The show carries a long and unwieldy title taken off a Wikipedia disclaimer: This is a dynamic list and may never be able to satisfy particular standards for completeness. For Chong, incompleteness is not a failure but a principle to celebrate. His work thrives in grey zones: the unread book, the closed door, the footnote that never gets read. His installations sprawl across nine thematically curated rooms – Words, Whispers, Ghosts, Journeys, Futures, Findings, Infrastructures, Surfaces and Endings – and each one feels like you have stumbled into the dumping ground of the information age. Heman Chong's Monument to the people we've conveniently forgotten (I hate you) (2008) is a sea of one million blacked-out business cards. PHOTO: SINGAPORE ART MUSEUM / HEMAN CHONG Take Monument to the people we've conveniently forgotten (I hate you) (2008), for instance. It comprises one million – yes, one million – blacked-out business cards strewn across the floor. You can walk over them, lie on top of them, bathe in them, if you like – but you will never know who these business cards belonged to. It is a sea of forgotten names and unrealised connections turned into a playground of amnesia. If memory is a battleground, then The Library of Unread Books (2016-ongoing) is its cemetery. It is made up of hundreds of books donated by the public – books that were bought but never read by their owners. Together, they make up a collective confession of good intentions not followed through. It is less a library and more a mausoleum of curiosity, celebrating the gulf between acquiring knowledge and actually engaging with it. The Library Of Unread Books by Heman Chong and Renee Staal is made up of hundreds of books purchased by hundreds of people but never read. PHOTO: SINGAPORE ART MUSEUM / HEMAN CHONG And then there is Calendars (2020-2096) (2004-2010), where Chong presents 1,001 calendar pages featuring images of emptied public spaces in Singapore. The dates extend decades into the future, flirting with the absurdity of planning for a tomorrow that may never come. Though created before the pandemic, its depictions of vacant spaces eerily foreshadow the emptiness of Covid-19 lockdowns. There are several new commissions. Among them is Wanderlust / Rebecca Solnit (2025), an exceptionally beautiful addition to his Cover (Versions) series, where Chong re-imagines book covers for titles he has not yet read but intends to. Other works such as Emails From Strangers (kami coar) (2025) and Oleanders (2023-ongoing) similarly celebrate the forgotten, the unread, the unspoken. A spam e-mail from a stranger is memorialised in Heman Chong's work Emails From Strangers (kami coar) (2025) . PHOTO: SINGAPORE ART MUSEUM / HEMAN CHONG Curation by June Yap and Kathleen Ditzig is masterful, shaping a space that is both clinically sterile and invitingly immersive. The show simultaneously asks you to step in and stay away, look closer and look away, question everything you think you know – or ignore everything you see. Somewhere in Singapore, Chong – archivist, agitator, provocateur, prankster – is having a laugh. The exhibition runs at the Singapore Art Museum until Aug 17
Business Times
14-05-2025
- Entertainment
- Business Times
Momcations gaining greater traction
IN THE past, mothers may have felt guilty for leaving their families behind for a quick getaway. Not anymore, it seems. These days, momcations – or vacations for mothers minus the shackles of parenting responsibilities – are getting more popular. Whether it is to spend time alone or with other mothers, such holidays allow mums to prioritise self-care, even if it's just for a few days. This way, they can – in their own words – become 'better mothers' when they return. In this week's BT Lifestyle, we look at this phenomenon that emerged in the 2010s but is now becoming more accepted. Speaking of vacations, don't we all want maximum mileage for our travel dollars? In Travel, we bring you tips on how to get the most out of your holiday budget, tell you when is the cheapest time to travel to this year's top summer hotspots, as well as the most affordable alternative destinations. In Arts, we take a look at the works of Singapore's leading conceptual artist, Heman Chong, as he holds a solo exhibition at the Singapore Art Museum. Then read our review of Singapore Repertory Theatre's Shakespeare in the Park: Macbeth. And in Dining, find out if the food at Violet Oon's new Dempsey Hill outlet is as impressive as its stunning premises. For all this and more, don't miss Friday's issue of BT.
