Past Solo Exhibition
Heman Chong: Meditations on Shadow Libraries 17.01.2024 — 10.03.2024
Information
Event has ended
17 January – 10 March 2024
About The Exhibition
Publishing today is full of contradictions between physical volumes and ephemeral digital products, between actual people and the endless possibilities of knowledge. Heman Chong’s solo exhibition at STPI gathers 9 bodies of work that form a new palimpsest of his multi-faceted practice, with its idiosyncratic movements in, around and between the production of images, performances, situations and writings.
Over the course of the past two decades, Chong has been preoccupied with the public library as ideology, material and site, and Meditations on Shadow Libraries explores the unexpected shapes and forms of today’s personal, individual or informal libraries given the way we rapidly share information and knowledge. How can we begin to think beyond a mere capitalisation of data? Should everyone be allowed to share information freely and without consequence? What would that system look and feel like? What are the limits of control when the ease of sharing knowledge becomes increasingly commonplace?
As an exhibition, Meditations on Shadow Libraries is both like a giant single artwork by Heman Chong, and a set of open-ended individual works through which multiple objects, experiences and ideas might pass. With lightness and humour, Chong deliberately widens the distance between knowledge and information by measuring them against the bodies they inhabit, even if temporarily. How are books and people always a new encounter with a shared enterprise, full of holes and unexplored domains?
Since 1999, the work of Heman Chong has been the subject of solo exhibitions at art galleries and institutions around the world. This is his second solo exhibition at STPI.
About the artist
Heman Chong
Residencies in 2006, 2020, 2023
Heman Chong (b. 1977, Muar, Malaysia, based in Singapore) is an artist, curator and writer whose practice investigates everyday behaviours and infrastructure to reveal how social constructs and power structures are woven into daily life. Further informed by an interest in how individuals and communities might imagine the future, he frequently employs science fiction as a metaphorical device and narrative approach.
Chong works across images, performances, situations and texts, in manners that shift between solemn and intimate, deliberate and accidental. Monument to the people we have conveniently forgotten (I hate you) (2008) is a site-specific installation comprising one million blacked out business cards strewn across the exhibition floor. Referencing the customary gesture of exchanging personal details in business relations, it acts loosely as a memorial for forgotten individuals while highlighting fleeting social connections. In Foreign Affairs (2018), Chong captures photographs of unassuming embassy backdoors—the spatial and symbolic threshold where discrete entries, or ‘slippages’, occur. Systematically repeated, the images resemble surveillance footage, leading the viewer to study the activity around the doors.
The artist obtained his Diploma in Visual Communications from Temasek Polytechnic, Singapore in 1997, and his MA in Communication Art and Design from the Royal College of Art, London in 2002. His work is held in numerous collections including Art Sonje Center, Seoul; Kadist Art Foundation, Paris; M+, Hong Kong; The National Museum of Art, Osaka; NUS Museum, Singapore; Rockbund Art Museum, Shanghai; Singapore Art Museum; and Weserburg Museum of Modern Art, Bremen.
Notable solo exhibitions include The Endless Summer (2024), UCCA Dune, Beidaihe; Writing While Walking And Other Stories (2020), Singapore Art Museum, Singapore; The Library of Unread Books (2019), Jameel Art Centre, Dubai; fictionfictionfiction (2019), Museum of Modern Art, Bremen; Spirits in the Material World (2019), Nieuwe Instituut, Rotterdam; The Library of Unread Books (2018), Kunstverein, Milan; Legal Books (Shanghai) (2018), Swiss Institute, New York; The Library of Unread Books (2017), Museum of Contemporary Art and Design, Manila; If, Ands, or Buts (2016), Rockbund Art Museum, Shanghai; and Never, A Dull Moment (2015), Art Sonje Center, Seoul. The artist has also participated in major international festivals including APT7 (2017), 7th Asia Pacific Triennial, Brisbane; For an Image, Faster Than Light (2016), 1st Yinchuan Biennale; The future is already here—it’s just not evenly distributed (2016), 20th Biennale of Sydney; Burning Down the House (2014), 10th Gwangju Biennale; Imagine Being Here Now (2011), 6th Momentum Nordic Biennial, Moss; In Dialogue with Northern Africa (2010), Manifesta 8, Murcia; Wonder (2008), 2nd Singapore Biennale; Chasm (2004), 2nd Busan Biennale; and Dreams and Conflicts (2003), 50th Venice Biennale.
Chong has had three residencies at the STPI Workshop in 2006, 2020 and 2023, with the latter two culminating in the exhibitions Peace Prosperity And Friendship With All Nations (2021), curated by Kathleen Ditzig, and Meditations on Shadow Libraries (2024), curated by Brian Kuan Wood.
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