Exploring the Provisional and the Unfinished
Singaporean artist Heman Chong is known for his approach as a bricoleur, someone who uses whatever materials are at hand to create without concern for their original purpose. This philosophy is reflected in the title of his solo exhibition: “This Is A Dynamic List And May Never Be Able To Satisfy Particular Standards For Completeness.” The phrase, borrowed from a Wikipedia disclaimer, captures a postmodern sensibility that underpins much of his work. Chong’s art grapples with the instability and loss of truth in the digital age.
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The exhibition, held at the Singapore Art Museum, showcases 51 works spanning from the early 2000s to the present, including six new commissions. These pieces trace the evolution of his conceptual practice against the backdrop of the rise of social media. Chong moves fluidly between photography, installation, performance, and painting, with an ongoing focus on the infrastructures that shape contemporary life.
One of the central themes in Chong’s work is the challenge to the notion that truth, often seen as a product of objective scientific inquiry, is universal. His artworks often reflect a tendency toward reflexivity. In 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 the artificial construction of the media, highlighting how they are ideologically driven.
Another piece, Foreign Affairs #106, features photos of embassy back doors from his travels. These images evoke the omnipresence of surveillance technology that tracks, governs, and commodifies everyday life. When language no longer points to reality, only surfaces remain, devoid of depth. As Fredric Jameson noted, “The past as ‘referent’ finds itself gradually bracketed and then effaced altogether, leaving us with nothing but texts.”
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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 titled Prospectus, which revolves around an artist accused of plagiarizing a younger artist’s novel also titled Prospectus. Frustrated, he deleted the novel only to recover just 239 words in 2024. Bits and pieces of his forever-lost work in English, translated into Mandarin via Google Translate, are presented out of context. There are only signifiers, with no signifieds.
The Fragility of Creative Works
In Secrets And Lies (The Impossibility Of Reconstitutions), Chong presents mountains of individual lines of literary text. He shredded 326 espionage novels, making it impossible to identify their origins. Modern literature, developed alongside Romanticism, once expressed human creativity in the face of industrialization. Over two centuries, it has been reduced to rubble. Technology shifts the status of creative works from divine genius to content in a no-man’s land.
Simple Sabotage presents an avalanche of fluorescent text on a black screen, evoking 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 Chong repurposes it as 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 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 moments of one’s life.
Capturing the Fringes of Urban 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—cats, tents, 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 106B Depot Road Singapore 102106, Chong collaborates with Jiehao Lau to reconstruct public housing, an expression of Singapore’s modernity, from memory rather than architectural plans. This work countersbalance order and rationality. The address is the location of Chong’s former home, where he lived and worked for 16 years.
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.
The Ephemeral Nature of Human Connections
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 deeper relationships.
As a bricoleur, Chong improvises an antidote from unrealized 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.
