Heman Chong

9 Oct-30 Nov 2024

Overview

The worst labyrinth is not that intricate form that can entrap us forever, but a single and precise straight line – Jorge Luis Borges

Images of books and books of images are, it would appear, equally fascinating to Heman Chong. As are libraries and labyrinths; the promise of revelation and the prospect of confusion can, after all, each be delectable in their own way. His fondness for the grid - emblem par excellence of modern order - may be deliberately confounded by intimations of the palimpsest, that timeworn tissue of sedimented meanings, veiled ideas and obscured import.

The life of the collector, according to Walter Benjamin, is characterised by just such a 'dialectical tension between the poles of order and disorder'. That said, Chong is the kind of 'collector' for whom the impulse to gather and assemble is subordinate to an even stronger compulsion to generate and disperse. Shades here, perhaps, of Andy Warhol's wilful misreading of the Rorschach system as creative means rather than analytic tool.

This exhibition, composed of four disparate but complementary works, is a subtly woven mesh that draws into its net a notable range of concerns: multiplicity and diversity, obliteration and retrieval, explorations of space and chartings of time, the lure of cartography and the legacy of colonialism.