Heman Chong: Peace Prosperity and Friendship with All Nations (Art & Photography)

STPI Gallery is pleased to announce Peace Prosperity And Friendship With All Nations, Heman Chong’s first solo exhibition at the gallery.

From the Brexit coin, the backdoors of embassies, the spy novel, and the Straits Times to the QR codes of Singapore’s COVID-19 SafeEntry system, the artworks in the exhibition bring together a constellation of conceptual gestures based upon everyday encounters and autobiographical objects that chronicle the complex political and cultural landscape of our present moment.

In the face of such expansive and everyday systems, the artworks, like the exhibition title, are ironic – at first funny and absurd and later bureaucratically insidious and unnerving. They are like bad jokes falling flat as reality sinks in.

Heman Chong’s (b. 1977, Malaysia, raised in Singapore) cultural work is situated at the intersection between image, performance, situations, and writing. Through intimate interrogation and intervention, Chong investigates the function of everyday infrastructure as a political medium. This conceptual preoccupation is best exhibited in his series Foreign Affairs (2018).
 

His work is included in the public collections of Art Sonje Center, Kadist Art Foundation, M+ Museum, The National Museum of Art Osaka, NUS Museum, Rockbund Art Museum, Singapore Art Museum and Weserburg Museum.

Heman Chong has exhibited in countless shows across the world.

Alex Lam