The Book Cover series
2009 - Painting (Painting)
Dimensions vary
Heman Chong
With a habit of reading eight to ten books at the same time, Chong paints his two-foot tall novel covers through referencing an extensive reading list (accessible on Facebook) he has kept since 2006. Entitled “Bibliography (1): The Lonely Ones,” the list outlines representations of solitude that has been imposed on individuals or communities. Chong divides these archetypes into three over-arching notions: the Hide-away, the Castaway and the Prisoner. A novella from Stephen King’s Different Seasons collection, Rita Hayworth And Shawshank Redemption tells a story of assumed identities and prisoners’ escape to reflect on the economic infrastructures inside and outside prison as well as the thin boundaries separating the two—in this case, a Rita Hayworth poster concealing a hole in the prison wall dug for jailbreak.
Heman Chong is an artist, curator, and writer who creates texts, objects, installations, and situations in order to investigate the manner through which individuals form associations between objects in their environments. Chong’s works have been considered “archetypally conceptual” and recall frameworks of the 1960s in their potential to address collective visions of futuristic utopias. Based largely on books, Chong’s works are striking in their creation of visual order as a means to draw out the “inevitably mnemonic nature of the conceptual object.”
Colors:
Other related works, blended automatically
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Heman Chong
2012The work Calendars is composed of 1001 images of deserted public areas in Singapore printed on pages of a calendar set from the year of 2020 until 2096...
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Zarouhie Abdalian
2010The first iteration of Flutter was specifically conceived for the Pro Arts Gallery space in Oakland in 2010, viewable from the public space of a sidewalk, and the version acquired by the Kadist Collection is an adaptation of it...
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Valeska Soares
2012Relying on repetition and repurposed materials, Soares works to interrogate time—its measurement, its passing, and its meaning...
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Jedediah Caesar
2009For Untitled, Caesar encased recycled objects such as scraps of plywood, paper or cloth in resin and then cut and reassembled the pieces into abstract forms...
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Chen Chieh-Jen
2010Empire’s Borders II – Passage and Empire’s Borders II – Workers are from the three-channel film installation Empire’s Borders II – Western Enterprise, Inc...
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Mauricio Ancalmo
2010War Footage is a series of wall-mounted works composed of 16mm film leader, tightly bound to flag-shaped panels by the artist...
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Du Zhenjun
2010The Tower of Babel is an installation of large-format photographs that forces the audience to occupy a central position through its monumental scale...
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Chen Chieh-Jen
2010Empire’s Borders II – Passage and Empire’s Borders II – Workers are from the three-channel film installation Empire’s Borders II – Western Enterprise, Inc...
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Mateo Lopez
2012With Roca Carbon ( Charcoal Rock , 2012) and Roca Grafito ( Graphite Rock , 2012), López plays with our relationship to inert and unremarkable objects such as rocks...
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Clarissa Tossin
2017Clarissa Tossin’s film Ch’u Mayaa responds to Frank Lloyd Wright’s Hollyhock House (constructed 1919–21) in Los Angeles, an example of Mayan Revival architecture...
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Runo Lagomarsino
2020Yo también soy humo (I am also smoke) is a 16mm film that has been digitized to video...
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Julieta Aranda
2016The video Swimming in rivers of Glue is composed of various images of nature, exploring the themes of exploration of space and its colonization...
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Nicolás Paris
2012Nicolas Paris studied architecture and worked as an elementary school teacher before he decided to become an artist...
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Runo Lagomarsino
2020On Fire by Runo Lagomarsino comprises twenty pieces of parchment, each of which has had the contours and map of Brazil burned in stages...
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Du Zhenjun
2010The Tower of Babel is an installation of large-format photographs that forces the audience to occupy a central position through its monumental scale...
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Nicolás Consuegra
2008In his project Instituto de Vision (2008), Consuegra investigates how modernism gave rise to many new technological forms of vision, most notably the camera, yet also resulted in the disappearance of outmoded forms of vision...
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Cerith Wyn Evans
2008Untitled (Perfect Lovers + 1) by Cerith Wyn Evans takes as its starting point Felix Gonzales-Torres’s seminal work Untitled (Perfect Lovers) , in which two clocks were synchronized and left to run without interference, the implication being that one would stop before the other...