Avoiding the 'Asian father voice'

This Is A Dynamic List And May Never Be Able To Satisfy Particular Standards For Completeness

- Shawn Hoo

Singaporean artist Heman Chong's survey at the Singapore Art Museum (SAM) begins with a veritable textual barrage. Over 2,000 unread books in various languages are set against posters carrying 239 words from a failed meta-fictional novel and its stilted machine-translated Mandarin.

No surprise then that the exhibition's title, lifted from a legal clause on Wikipedia, is a mouthful — This Is A Dynamic List And May Never Be Able To Satisfy Particular Standards For Completeness. These 16 words, printed simply on a banner hoisted above the reception desk, constitute the exhibition's first artwork.

"A lot of my works look like they're made with a maximalist intent, but I'm actually a minimalist," says the 47-year-old Muar-born artist ahead of his first major survey show, which runs from May 10 to Aug 17.

He sees The Library Of Unread Books — a project collecting unread books from the public ongoing since 2016 — less as an invitation to read every publication but as one "social sculpture". Similarly, the 239 words on the wall are but the remainder of a 200-page novel Chong had deleted in a fit of frustration that he later paid thousands of dollars to recover.

By opening the exhibition with words, Chong — an avid reader of writers such as Clarice Lispector, Roberto Bolano and Kurt Vonnegut — pares down art-making to its basics: "The act of writing is the most economical way of making something."