The Book Cover series

2009 - Painting (Painting)

Dimensions vary

Heman Chong

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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.

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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.”

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Colors:

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• identity.n.01
• literature.n.02
• person.n.01
• object.n.01
• environment.n.01
• community.n.01
• contemporary conceptualism
• contemporary participation
• found objects
• installation art
• singaporean