#stpigallery

[hemanchong]

'Labyrinths (Libraries)' (2022-ongoing) is a set of images resembling maps of spaces produced out of tight #grids. These are are spaces that are highly organised, with very little room for any form of #improvisation. Horizontal and vertical lines dominate the surfaces of these paintings, forming #pathways that are navigated in one's mind but not break out of. Within every #library, we can locate books which contain many opposing ideas. These #paintings think about multiplicity and the relations between these books and the spaces between them as a landscape of our contemporary time. The visual language within each painting found in 'Labyrinths (Libraries)' is a constant oscillation between positive and negative spaces; sparking an interest in thinking about how ideas can be easily veiled and hidden behind other ideas. 'Cover (Versions)' (2009-ongoing) is an on-going series of #bookcovers imagined as paintings. The selected titles are taken from an extensive and #idiosyncratic list that is constantly expanding via #recommendations sent to him by his friends. Most of these books have never been #read at the time the painting is produced, but is to be read at some point in his life. Each painting is improvised; there has never been an assumption of how the painting might look. Chong discursively exhausts two sets of parallel vocabularies found in painting and graphic design. The abstracted book covers are not intended as reflections on or interpretations of their literary titles, but rather as a way to highlight relationships between textual and non-textual forms. #HemanChong #ROHProjects #STPIGallery #Indonesia #Jakarta #CoverVersions #LabyrinthsLibraries #Bookstagram #Booksofig #booksofinstagram #books #book #libraries #library (at ROH) https://www.instagram.com/p/CmD0TFTrXoO/?igshid=NGJjMDIxMWI=

[hemanchong]

A big shout out to all the art handlers who help move our work around the world! Thank you @helutrans_artmove! #HemanChong #ROHProjects #STPIGallery #arthandlers #arthandler #helutrans (at ROH Projects) https://www.instagram.com/p/Clx7ojprOak/?igshid=NGJjMDIxMWI=

[hemanchong]

This is what I’m showing with @stpi_gallery at @artbasel Miami Beach this year. The booth is G26. Please go see it. This is the backdoor I located in Tokyo. I remember the excitement and fascination that I was wrapped up in, having stumbled upon a new series I can work on. I remember I was pretty dry that year, and was desperate for something new to sink my teeth into. Anything. This was back in 2018. I remember almost instantly deciding on the title for the work. I lifted off the name of a government ministry from Singapore. Foreign Affairs. I’ve always been interested in the realm of secrets and lies and how these things seem to perpetuate the way infrastructural systems function. Transparency isn’t always transparent. These backdoors represent these liminal spaces where things move in the shadows. Unrecorded messages passed from one nation to another. What are the politics of intimacy? There’s nothing more intimate than having things slip through backdoors. #HemanChong #ForeignAffairs #ArtBaselMiamiBeach2022 #ArtBasel #ArtBaselMiamiBeach #Stpi #StpiGallery #Singapore #Tokyo #Hiroo #Embassy #Backdoors #Backdoor #Secrets #Lies #AppearanceVsReality #Appearances #Doors #OpenSesame (at Art Basel Miami Beach) https://www.instagram.com/p/Clh5F-0LwP_/?igshid=NGJjMDIxMWI=

[hemanchong]

Next stop @stpi_gallery with @emieu1208 #hanulrichobrist #rikrittiravanija #emieu #stpigallery #singapore #seoul #friezeseoul #seoul (at COEX Convention & Exhibition Center) https://www.instagram.com/p/Ch_5YgsLC3I/?igshid=NGJjMDIxMWI=

[hemanchong]

Thank you @rohprojects for showing my work alongside other amazing artists @artjakarta! Looking forward to installing my show with you in December! It’ll be awesome! Exciting! #HemanChong #ROHprojects #STPIgallery #ArtJakarta #Jakarta #Indonesia #Bookstagram #Books #BookCovers #FightClub #ChuckPalahnluk #StraightIsTheGate #AndreGide #Frankenstein #MaryShelley #WelcomeToTheNHK #TatsuhikoTakimoto #TheIslandOfTheDaybefore #UmbertoEco #LetTheRightOneIn #JohnAjvideLindqvist #CoverVersions #booksbooksbooks #booklover #bookdesign #booknerd #bookaddict #bookpainting #booklove (at Art Jakarta) https://www.instagram.com/p/ChuXwtarUMB/?igshid=NGJjMDIxMWI=

[hemanchong]

I totally forgot about this. Last 2 days to see 2 of my paintings @stpi_gallery #HemanChong #ThingsThatUnremainWritten #STPIGallery #STPI #Singapore (at STPI - Creative Workshop & Gallery) https://www.instagram.com/p/Cg57WZlFqJi/?igshid=NGJjMDIxMWI=

[hemanchong]

Happy to be working on my next solo show @stpi_gallery with Brian Kwan Wood as my partner in crime. Show opens 28 Oct 2023. What a luxury to have so much time to work towards something! #HemanChong #BrianKwanWood #STPIGallery #STPI #Singapore (at STPI - Creative Workshop & Gallery) https://www.instagram.com/p/CgCm8pjMAcd/?igshid=NGJjMDIxMWI=

[hemanchong]

Happy to be showing a small selection of my book cover paintings alongside a larger painting derived from my reading of Clarice Lispector’s The Hour of The Star at @stpi_gallery’s booth in Art Basel Hong Kong. For the past 13 years, I’ve been working on these surfaces that could possibly generate ways of entering books via the combination of lines, colours, textures, and compositions. They are often gateways into other things. There’s always so much to read. #HemanChong #BookCover #BookCoverDesign #ArtBaselHongKong2022 #ArtBaselHongKong #ArtBasel #HongKong #STPIGallery #Singapore #TheHourOfTheStar #ClariceLispector #Bookstagram #booksofinstagram #booksig #bookstagrammer #books #bookrecommendations #TheLibraryOfUnreadBooks (at Art Basel Hong Kong) https://www.instagram.com/p/Cd6eGaGBiP5/?igshid=NGJjMDIxMWI=

[hemanchong]

My show at @stpi_gallery is now open and it runs till 18 April. It has lots and lots of work and is the result of many months of talking to @kditzig about my practice and how we can locate it within different contexts and situations. Please go have a look when you have time! #HemanChong #stpigallery #Singapore #PeaceProsperityAndFrienshipWithAllNations (at STPI - Creative Workshop & Gallery) https://www.instagram.com/p/CLrrAW7lUgp/?igshid=ubyjla8jp2gq

[hemanchong]

A very thoughtful and considered review of my recent solo show #PeaceProsperityAndFriendshipWithAllNations by @lyndo.tay in @artasiapacific : “Consistent in the works across the exhibition are Chong’s #cerebral #strategies concerning the systems that govern our lives, which shine through upon quiet #contemplation. Through #repetition and #deliberate #obfuscations, each work gestures towards the #creeping aspects of #alienating and #deceptively familiar #mechanisms, creating imageries that unravel without #disclosure.” #HemanChong #StpiGallery @stpi_gallery @kat_ditzig (at STPI - Creative Workshop & Gallery) https://www.instagram.com/p/CPOFFIXF1mh/?utm_medium=tumblr

[hemanchong]

Heman Chong perhaps reads the Straits Times closer than anyone else. Abstracts From The Straits Times is a series of repetitive abstractions from Singapore’s primary daily newspaper. The artist’s abstracts are based on a cache of print-ready PDFs of the newspaper that he found online. Reading has always been a performance of a text and a remaking through instantiation. In Chong’s abstraction of a page from the Straits Times, an edition from the series about a broken down lift in a public housing estate, it becomes impossible to read the newspaper rather the repetition of the image illustrating the story ‘blacks’ out the text and cuts through it, insisting on the image as a self-evident statement. In a media landscape policed by the expanded understandings of political correctness, POFMAs (Protection from Online Falsehoods and Manipulation Act), accusations of ‘fake news’, trials of public opinion and ‘deep-fake’ technology, Chong’s emphasis on the newspaper image critically points to the persuasiveness of the breakdown as envisioned in an elevator, a fireman and darkness at the expense of its context. Abstracts From The Straits Times are exceptional images in that they are impossible images. It is almost impossible to believe that Chong is able to create such an ‘alternative’ image of the newspaper because of the overt legal parameters that govern and define the newspaper business in Singapore. Beyond interrogating the modalities of news and the creation of public discourse based on marshalling compelling images, Abstracts From The Straits Times as conceptual object effects alarm in how it manifests the very literal limits of how we can read a newspaper. Text by @kat_ditzig #KathleenDitzig #StpiGallery #AbstractsFromTheStraitsTimes #HemanChong (at STPI - Creative Workshop & Gallery) https://www.instagram.com/p/CNpLheqlx5e/?igshid=1iim3gym4vq4o

[hemanchong]

Last two weekends to see my fucking awesome show @stpi_gallery that’s curated by @kat_ditzig. #PeaceProsperityAndFriendshipWithAllNations brings a number of provocations regarding international #diplomacy, #culturalcapital and the #pandemic into one space. It’s really worth having a look. Or two. Fuck, bring your kids to it. Why not. Seen here is a new work #CallForTheDead where I had #redacted the entire #novel of the same name by #JohnLeCarre, leaving only behind the verbs, forming a landscape of emptied out #actions. Please go check it out before it ends 18 April. #HemanChong #StpiGallery (at STPI - Creative Workshop & Gallery) https://www.instagram.com/p/CNY6oLUl3f9/?igshid=b88kf1rqy905

[hemanchong]

My new book #PeaceProsperityAndFriendshipWithAllNations edited by @kditzig and produced by @rollingrach and published by @stpi_gallery is on sale @singaporeartbookfair over this weekend! Please go and buy a copy! #HemanChong #StpiGallery #KathleenDitzig #Bookstagram #BooksOfInstagram (at 72-13) https://www.instagram.com/p/CMBzAsOloQB/?igshid=1hnenvmt8usbi

[hemanchong]

One of my favourite #jokes. Ever. Contains everything I love about life: #Zen #HotDogs #Change #NewYorkCity. #HemanChong #STPIgallery (at STPI - Creative Workshop & Gallery) https://www.instagram.com/p/CIuwgNwFlaX/?igshid=18he7pab3yaey

[hemanchong]

A review of my show in @friezeofficial by @bing___hao. “Throughout the exhibition, Chong appears to respond facetiously or provocatively to current affairs. But the topicality of his practice belies a broader investigation into structures of power. Indeed, as curator @kat_ditzig argues in her catalogue essay, Chong’s works ‘make transparent the everydayness of systems of governance’. This is perhaps most evident in ‘#ForeignAffairs’ (2018), a series of #photographs of #embassy #backdoors from around the world, printed onto #canvases and #curtains. The presence of these #clandestine #thresholds to #sovereign spaces suggests the need for both #access and #secrecy, #privacy and porosity. Chong calls attention to this #duality. Pulling aside the curtains, which cordon-off spaces in the gallery, visitors find themselves facing only more backdoors, this time on canvas, quickly dousing the thrill of revelation.” #peaceprosperityandfriendshipwithallnations #HemanChong #BingHao #KathleenDitzig #StpiGallery (at STPI - Creative Workshop & Gallery) https://www.instagram.com/p/CP2hQ4_l2eH/?utm_medium=tumblr

[hemanchong]

In #CallForTheDead (2020)—83 black-and-white scans of pages from the eponymous #1961 novel by #JohnLeCarré, screen-printed on linen and hung in a grid-like formation in a long, white-walled gallery—Chong takes his experiments with text into new territory. The #ColdWar fantasies of the mid-century #spygenre might here be read as a comment on #decoloniality: the novel was written while #LeCarré was working as a spy for #MI6—which had a regional outpost in #Singapore. Chong has intervened in this text by #redacting everything but the verbs: “#killed […] #fired […] #remembered […] #fought,” reads one cluster. Among the most impactful yet #enigmatic works in the show, the prints have an #ambiguous quality, at once #pictorial and #linguistic, #physical and seemingly #immaterial. Chong is a writer as well as an artist, and his engagement with historical, political, fictional, and philosophical texts—as indicated here—point to an interest in how knowledge and power are constructed through the interplay of images and words. As the repeated pages in Call for the Dead indicate, the grid—with its flattened, geometric, and ordered structure—is a motif of this exhibition. In the 2018 photo series “#ForeignAffairs,” for instance, Chong has photographed the back entrances of embassies and printed them in a grid formation on canvases and on curtains, where regimented sequences of images depict windows, fences, doors, mirrors, gates, brick walls, and barbed wire overgrown with plants. Out of these repetitions and variations emerges the sense of an architectural type: the artist here seems interested in bringing to light how the #mythical function of embassies, as symbols of #protection and #power, are physically constituted. Text by @chris.han2021 Published by @art.agenda_ #HemanChong @stpi_gallery #stpiGallery (at STPI - Creative Workshop & Gallery) https://www.instagram.com/p/CR64SRLlTjS/?utm_medium=tumblr