Heman Chong at Singapore Art Museum

 Heman Chong, Monument to the people we've conveniently forotten (I hate you), 2008, one million offset prints on 300-gsm paper

 

By TRAVIS JEPPESEN July 28, 2025

Singapore: a place where everything functions so well, it might as well be hell. Hell, of course, in our most antiseptic conception of the place – a tiny nation so tidy and orderly that it’s all but impossible to reap any kind of inspiration from it. Unless you happen to be Heman Chong, an artist raised on the island conceived as a sort of capitalist dictatorship, though operating under the guise of democracy; an artist who, as this current survey showcasing more than twenty years of his work at the Singapore Art Museum makes clear, has honed the city-as-muse into his own twisted and often ironic form of visual poetry.

            Chong is inspired by classical conceptualism and literary fiction – two poles of influence that at first seem antithetical; but the more you consider his work, the more the blending of the two begins to make some kind of sense. While I’m often immune to the supposed intrigues of the former – conceptual art’s frequent employ of mind-numbing seriality seeming, to me, to serve as a substitute for the excitement of spontaneity that satiates true artistic awakening – Chong’s peculiar genius is inspired enough to find beauty, irony, and pathos in such forms of expression. Here I’m thinking of one of the highlights of the show, Perimeter Walk, 550 photographs taken by Chong in his frequent peregrinations, this time around the borderlands of the city-state – in addition to being an artist, Chong is also a big walker – between the years of 2013 and 2024, turned into a wall of postcards. Turns out, you can see a whole lot of Singapore in taking such a route, and this journey yielded a great variety of quintessential imagery that immediately becomes clear to the resident or medium-term visitor: the patchwork detail of an apartment block, from which a single unit has suspended the country’s flag from beneath a window; a concrete shell of a structure, probably military in nature, with satellite dish on top; an orderly pile of neatly wrapped garbage bags; a close-up of a double whopper, taken from a Burger King ad; a close-up of a crack in a wall; a close-up of the sea. Singapore confronts the Singaporeans. Or whoever else happens into the museum during the exhibition’s run.

Heman Chong, The Library of Unread Books, 2016-ongoing, book previously unread by their owners, tables, chairs
 

This is serial outdoor imagery transformed into epic poetry, one that resonates or else harmonizes nicely with a similar work, this one transformed into wall calendars extending into the year 2096, comprised of 1,001 images of empty interiors. Calendars (2020-2096) is the title. The rule that Chong gave himself was that he could not use speech to negotiate the emptiness of the interior; so, at times, when he came across a place he wished to photograph, he would have to wait for several minutes or even hours until it cleared out so that he could get the shot he wanted. A kind of novel about Singapore, which, mapped out on this forward timeline, becomes a science fiction, contemporary and retrofuturistic at once. In a way, it’s illegible to those who don’t live here or have never visited; though, in the spectral quality resulting from the emptiness, the void of human life at the core of these images and the surreal plastic feeling of artifice that comes to the forefront, it does conjure a Singapore of the mind that holds universal promises.

Elsewhere, Chong shows a series of screenprints on canvas – which he calls paintings – of multiple front pages of the Straits Times superimposed on top of each other, the headlines blurring into nonsensicality. A subtle jab at his country’s paper of record, so-called: it is widely regarded, both inside and outside of Singapore, as propaganda lite, the government’s official mouthpiece, devoid of anything remotely critical. This act of deliberate obscuring, which makes it impossible to read, seems to produce the question: Why even bother to read this?

 Heman Chong, The Straits Times, Friday, September 27, 2013, Cover, 2018, UV print on unprimed canvas

The sole other act of painting in this exhibition has its own dedicated room, and features Chong’s re-imaginings of book covers – all of them abstract – of his favorite novels. Among them, Wanderlust by Rebecca Solnit, its title and author inscribed in white in the upper left corner, the design centered on a flesh-colored asterisk partially obscured by purple clouding. Chong’s love of writing, books, manifests everywhere; in particular, his most famous work, The Library of Unread Books, which he co-created with Renée Staal and has been installed in exhibition contexts throughout the world, including the lobby of the Singapore Art Museum for the current show. Anyone can donate to this library, and seats are made available for those who wish to while away an afternoon with one of its volumes in hand. Once a year, Chong will make a book stack sculpture, a selection of which are arranged on a large plinth in one of the exhibition spaces: usually three or four books stacked on top of one another, their titles forming a poem: one from 2005 reads Intimacy / Protest / What is the Artist’s Role Today? / Everyday Life in the Modern World.
 

Heman Chong, The Singapore Flag, 2015, site-specific wall installation, appropriated text

 
Heman Chong, Perimeter Walk, 2013-2024, offset print postcards, 550 pieces

If Singapore were to elect a Poet Laureate, I’d say Heman Chong should be a prime candidate. Maybe he’s not a poet in the traditional sense of the term, but his visual poetics at the same time pay homage to, and critically interrogate certain vested narratives of this idiosyncratic city-state, with which he has a clear love/hate relationship – the sort of relationship that is necessary in order to see through the bullshit of propaganda as well as the “Disneyland with the death penalty” cynicism of its harshest critics. The acts of hate, however, are more often funny than not: such as a wall text that is comprised of the official description of the Singaporean flag, snatched from the government’s website. Chong made it with the intention of having the state buy the work for its collection at the National Gallery, which it did: the Singaporean state was thus put into the bizarre position of having to pay the artist for a text that they themselves had written. These gestures are ultimately overwritten with acts of love and affection – which is my characterization and one that the artist would likely object to. Chong also maintains a Youtube account called AmbientWalking, with more than twenty-five thousand subscribers as of this writing, that simply documents his walks through Singapore. Sure, perhaps his viewers more often than not use these videos as a tool to help them fall asleep. Nonetheless, what shines through in these clips is the discrete beauty of the place, best admired not from one of its numberless high rises, but from the ground, whence all life ultimately sprouts. WM