UNPACKING POSTMODERNITY

Heman Chong's solo exhibition at Singapore Art Museum explores the instability of truth and meaning in the digital age

- STORY: THANA BOONLERT

Singaporean artist Heman Chong is a bricoleur. He does not care about the purity of a system and uses materials at hand for creation without regard to their original purpose. It comes as no surprise then his solo exhibition's title declares such provisionality - "This Is A Dynamic List And May Never Be Able To Satisfy Particular Standards For Completeness.

Appropriated from a disclaimer on Wikipedia, this unwieldy string of words signals a postmodern bent in his oeuvre. Chong grapples with the instability and loss of truth in a digital age.

Running at the Singapore Art Museum, Chong's first exhibition features 51 works from the early 2000s to present, including six new commissions, charting the prolific course of his conceptualism against the rise of social media. He moves fluidly between photography, installation, performance and painting. At the core of his practice is an interrogation of infrastructures that underpin contemporary life.

Chong challenges the common view that truth — a product of objective, scientific inquiry — is universal. As suggested by the playful title, some of his artworks express tendency towards reflexivity. In The Straits Times, Friday, September 27, 2013, Cover, he uses repetition and overlap to create a palimpsest of a daily newspaper sheet.

The intentional glitch draws attention to its own status as something artificially constructed, highlighting that the media are ideologically mired in their service. In Foreign Affairs #106, he arranged photos of embassy back doors encountered during his trips, which evoke the omnipresence of surveillance technology that tracks, governs and commodifies everyday life.