Of Indeterminate Time Or Occurrence
For viewers familiar with Heman Chong’s art, the painterly aspects of some of his latest Cover (Versions) might have come as a surprise. Shown in his recent solo exhibition at FOST Gallery, ‘Of Indeterminate Time Or Occurrence’, the paintings are part of an ongoing series that depict the imaginary covers of various books, all equal in size. While some canvases featured the muted tones and geometrical forms characteristic of the series, others contained quasi-expressionist manipulations of paint and colour, as if they were metaphorically representing their books’ subjects and titles. No doubt that the operative word here was ‘quasi’, in that Chong’s works are almost always sardonic comments on the presumed sanctity and subjectivity of artistic expression.
Of Indeterminate Time Or Occurrence brought together four works by Chong that explored various issues of interpretation related to images and text. As a contextualisation of ongoing and new works, it offered the possibility of understanding each work on its own terms, and also as part of an extended oeuvre. How the very ‘terms’ of an artwork emerge and operate formed part of the exhibition’s broader enquiry into the construction and dislocation of narrative meaning. Positioned like nodes within the niches of FOST’s gallery space, the works read like a constellation, each bound up within a larger, inter-textual web.
Of all the works in the exhibition, Chong’s Cover (Versions) particularly embodied this idea. Chong’s relationship to the books that he paints has always been ambiguous; many of them have been recommended to him by friends, others are simply books that he owns. What is clear, however, is that these are not paintings of books but of signs—literary works