Renowned Singaporean artist Heman Chong gears up for a series of global exhibitions

The STPI exhibition is also deeply ensconced in its home turf. Another new work in the show is Eternal Returns, the result of research Chong has been doing since 2017 on long-demolished buildings in Singapore where cultural figures once lived; he has addresses for the late pioneering Singaporean painter Georgette Chen, and one for late British Singaporean sculptor Kim Lim, for example. It features paintings he created on small metal sheets, like business cards, to spark thoughts on the art once made in these places.

Chong is clever, not difficult to be around, and has a distinct point of view. He is also playful, deeply intellectual, and yet surprisingly accessible. Maria Taniguchi, winner of the 2015 Hugo Boss Asia Art Award and one of the Philippines’ brightest art stars, says: “I first saw Heman’s work at the Singapore President’s Young Talents exhibition 20 years ago. He had just finished grad school. I have been a fan of his work since. Some years after that first sighting, we met through a mutual friend and now we chat all the time.”

Pauline Yao, chief curator at Hong Kong’s M+ museum, describes Chong as “a maker of objects and a facilitator of situations”; the museum of visual culture, which opened in the autumn of 2021, owns no less than eight of his works. One of the opening exhibitions, an ongoing show, includes Chong’s piece consisting of one million black name cards piled into a corner. He made Monument to the People We’ve Conveniently Forgotten (I Hate You), originally for the 2008 Singapore Biennale. It was the first work by a Southeast Asian artist bought by M+, and is one of the popular works at the museum today.

“There is a way that Heman’s work encourages us to question our systems and structures that we exist in, with wit and open-endedness. His works often have an air of mystery; they are never didactic but instead [they] invite us to confront our own relationship to what he addresses, asking us to claim some imaginative agency,” says Khalaf, who also curates for London’s prestigious Serpentine Galleries. 

Work seemingly keeps Chong constantly occupied. “I have boundaries,” he insists, although, like his art, they are mostly psychological constructs. He makes many of his paintings in his studio, but he also lives there. It is walking distance from Labrador Park MRT, where the station art is his creation—a multi-floor installation that is “meant to be open to the commuter’s interpretation, and aims to encourage them to think about things they do not understand”.

The idea of boundaries is perhaps more credible in terms of his process. Chong says, “I work completely alone. I have no studio manager, no assistant—and it’s not because I can’t work with someone; I’m actually very good at working with people. But what I really do enjoy is to have this time for myself. Every work is made by my own hands. I’m not against artists using assistance to make the work, but I feel like it’s a different kind of work. I prefer making the work with my hands because, for me, it’s also autobiographical. I like the fact that I touch the work, and that it’s a very intimate thing.”

This solo approach allows for a fair amount of freedom in terms of scheduling. “There’s never a master plan; I wrap my days around how I feel about things. I always think to myself that my final retrospective before I die would be called It’s Just a Feeling,” he says, laughing. “And actually, underneath all that conceptualism and that huge sort of big thinking, big thought, lies something very emotional, like how I feel about the day, how do I feel about working on this project. It’s always very intimate,” he says.

For a man who says he never has a plan, his trajectory has been consistently upward—although he does acknowledge that luck or simply good timing played a role. “I think I just sort of stumbled into [success as an artist] because for a very long time I studied graphic design. I was a graphic designer for almost eight years before I got roped into this thing called art making. From the very beginning, it has always been an accidental thing, but it’s a happy accident because I’m actually built for the art world, and I function very, very well in it. I’m very quick and nimble, and there’s a certain kind of versatility on my end that works very well in the art world.”

After studying for a diploma in electronic media design at Singapore’s Temasek Polytechnic, Chong earned a master’s in communication art and design from London’s Royal College of Art. Back home, he tried working in advertising but found himself more comfortable in more experimental visual arts and theatre communities, deciding to move to Berlin, then New York. By 2003, his work was in the Singapore Pavilion of the Venice Biennale. Since then, his work has made regular appearances at international exhibitions and workshops, and he has guest lectured extensively. Chong’s works have also appeared at art mega-events: Busan in 2004, Manifesta in 2010, Performa in 2011 and Asia Pacific Triennale in 2012. As Taniguchi puts it: “Heman is everywhere!”

One of his series that first caught the attention of international audiences was cover designs for significant novels, a nod to his affection for libraries. Though his oeuvre is extremely diverse, he continues to make book covers, a process he describes as “immensely pleasurable” which draws from his graphic design training, though he paints each one. In fact, he says his dream project, if there were no restrictions on time, funding or space, would be to build a library. “I love libraries. It was the first space I experienced as a child that I felt safe in. The first book I ever read was Miffy, and it was in the Stamford library in Singapore [the now-demolished Old National Library Building]. I immediately felt safe reading that book in that library on my own. It was a taste of independence as a child.”

Then the conceptualist in him surfaces: “A library is not just a collection of books. I would love to think of the library as an artwork, and that the books within the library would be collected via very interesting and informal, almost subversive sort of ways.”

Chong’s plans for a more global presence will no doubt be made easier by his enjoyment of travel. It’s clearly both a break from having to bear the standard for Singapore, but also a source of renewal for him. In a regular year, he typically spends many weeks in a year on the road (or in the air), seeing things, catching up with friends, and plotting new projects.

For example, about a year ahead of Chong’s big 2024 solo exhibition at the complicated beachside UCCA Dune space, he was in Europe for meetings on some scheduled and potential projects there. He then returned home to Singapore for a few days, where one might think he would like to chill for a bit after seemingly relentless international movement; instead, he returned to his studio for a bit, before heading to Tokyo.

Seeking details about that upcoming show at the Beidaihe outpost of China’s biggest independent contemporary art institution, I contacted UCCA director Philip Tinari, himself an institution within the industry. Tinari replies to my iMessage in seconds.

“He’s here. I am sitting with him,” he texts, following up with a selfie. The curator and Chong are dressed in art-world-regulation black, sitting at a hipster Beijing hangout. They’d been discussing Beidaihe and life. Tinari looks into the camera phone seriously, Chong smiles, flashing a V for victory sign, a foreshadowing, surely, of his success yet to come.

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