Hemen Chong’s solo project The Sole Proprietor and Other Stories curated by Vitamin Creative Space reflects a lot on the conversations between Heman Chong,the novelist Hu Fang and the curator Zhang Wei who is also the founder of Vitamin Creative Space. The project was started from a discussion about spirituality and approach to life, and the project was continuing from that departure, exploring the “concrete abstraction” relationship between individuals and forms. The project deals a lot with our daily urban environments – how we live in it with specific way of reading, how the “visual lauguge” actually comes from the fragments of daily experiences. It is about the time and the space- the advanced furture that we are facing- in a post information time, which infulences the way of today’s artistic practices. Meantime, the project is also an observation of the contributions from young generation artists within wider understanding of the Chinese context, which is always the research basis of artistic projects at Vitamin Creative Space.
A publication with texts from Hu Fang / Astrid Mania / Binna Choi / Rodney Latourelle / Leif Magne Tangen / Joselina Cruz / Russell Storer / Cosmin Costinas is launched on the occasion of the exhibition.
About Heman Chong
Heman Chong is an observer, gatherer and presenter of ideas and images. With a keen interest in the processes of visual culture, he is often able to toss his works into different configurations to suit the particular conditions of each exhibition/presentation. He received his M.A. in Communication Art & Design at The Royal College of Art, London. Born in 1977 and currently lives and works in Singapore and Berlin, Germany.
Work List
A short story about a magazine established in 1984 which gained a world-wide underground following of amateur espionage spies as told by graphic design historian (Passage Magazine : October 1984 – November 1988)
50 print-on demand books, offset print, acrylic case, 2006
A short story about an unknown organism from Australia that is bent on infiltrating a given space as told by a geomancer (I’d like to die without feeling any pain)
3000 self-adhesive stickers with off-set print, 2006
A short story about a temporary situational cover-up of certain disruptions within a given space as told by an urbanist of the City of Paris (I’d like to teach the world to sing)
Inkjet print on paper, mounted on wall, 2006
A short story about a series of newly discovered photographs of a crime in a given space from twenty years back as told by a rubber plantation worker (I’d like to have flown over Brazil at least once in my life)
Red light bulb (spray painted) installed over an existing locked door, 2006
Against the Day, Stopping the Process, All Tomorrow’s Parties, The Man in the High Castle
4 books, 7 glasses, 2006
City Plaza
C-type print, 2006
Untitled (A woman walks into a multi-storey library. She searches for a man reading “What we talk about when we talk about love” amongst the shelves. She slaps him in the face. He looks at her in disbelief.) #01- 10
1 min (1 sequence), 10 min (10 sequences), PAL DVD, Colour, 2006
With support from
National Arts Council of Singapore
“A sole proprietorship is an unincorporated business that is owned by one individual. It is the simplest form of business organization to start and maintain. The business has no existence apart from you, the owner. Its liabilities are your personal liabilities. You undertake the risks of the business for all assets owned, whether used in the business or personally owned. You include the income and expenses of the business on your own tax return.”
– Dictionary.com definition.
“Let’s say there are a library and a reader. This reader wants to, in her autistic euphoria, read all the books and prints – everything ever published. Nothing less. This is, in the physical universe we occupy, normally not possible (given a huge amount of volumes to read within a rather limited time frame). So there has to be a radical selection process. This problem is not easy to overcome, because each book that you pick up relates to one or several other books, and they again to others, and they might all just be interesting. In order to help a reader in conflicts like this, there might be something close to a natural law that one can trust: As much as, say, 85% of everything made, even written material, is deceitful. The last 15% might just be good. Trust this lie, and it will be easier to understand everything. Furthermore, we would have been told another lie that in earlier times it was much easier to “know everything” – and that the mass of production within every field, together with the ever-growing number of fields, makes it impossible to do something like this now.”
– Leif Magne Tangen “Untitled (They Become Silent Again)”
from the publication The Sole Proprietor and Other Stories by Heman Chong and Vitamin Creative Space