ART CITIES: Shanghai -Heman Chong

Heman Chong is an artist, curator and writer, he has frequently been called a conceptual artist. While the generic tag has often been used as a blunt shorthand for pinning down artistic practices divested of any form of medium specificity, its application to Chong packs a certain precision. Chong’s works are thoroughly, almost archetypally conceptual. But their relationship to the legacy of late-‘60s conceptualism is less one of indebtedness than critical cognizance of the movement’s latent capacities specifically its potentiality as a framework for collective imaginings of futurity.

By Dimitris Lempesis
Photo: Rockbund Art Museum Archive

“Ifs, Ands, or Buts” is Heman’s Chong first solo exhibition at a museum in China. It features seven new commissions, produced specifically for the Rockbund Art Museum, that investigate the relationship between image and text through the relationships formed within the works. The works of the exhibition are a continuation of his highly-conceptualized investigations into how various groups and individuals imagine the future, which he uses to produce his multi-varied works. The exhibition begins with a site specific installation entitled “Legal Bookshop (Shanghai)”. It involves the displacement of the gift shop with a bookshop. For this work, Chong hired Ken Liu, a lawyer who is also an award-winning author and translator of speculative fiction via email. The choice of books is solely Liu’s. Chong’s involvement is merely to invite him to participate by selecting the books, all of which will be available for sale at this temporary bookshop. In his mixed media installation, “The Mysterious Island”, Chong attempts to recreate the fictional utopia that is The Peach Blossom Spring, a motif that is integral to East-Asian mythology, as well as pop culture. This installation is constructed from ready-made plastic peach blossom trees and set against a blue backdrop, much like ones used on film production sets. The two channel video installation “Re-Re-Re-Run” features every single episode from Rowan Atkinson’s Mr. Bean and The Road Runner animations, which will be looped for the entire duration of the exhibition on a large outdoor LED screen. The artist’s continuing engagement with text as a supple, versatile medium can also be seen in “Papaya Daily” (an obvious dig at the Hong Kong tabloid Apple Daily), a compilation of gossip that Chong either heard directly or read about, since 2003. “Endless (Nights)”, is a sculpture made up of 10.000 copies of unprinted, blank newspapers sit quietly in a darkened room. The performance, “Everything (Baike)” witness a series of readers sliding over the content of the Chinese online encyclopedia, as an unrealized, unfinished fiction.

Info: Curator: Li Qi, Rockbund Art Museum, 20 Huqiu Road, Huangpu District, Shanghai, Duration: 23/1-3/5/16, Days & Hours: Tue-Sun 10:00-18:00, www.rockbundartmuseum.org