2016

627 580 2.5

One Thousand And One Nights

2016
Light box
627 x 580 x 2.5 cm

2016

Legal Bookshop (Shanghai)

2016
Framed documents, books,
display tables, neon light
Variable dimensions

2016

Legal Bookshop (Shanghai)

2016
Framed documents, books,
display tables, neon light
Variable dimensions

2016

450 900 100

Re-Re-Re-Run
2016
Dual-channel video
installation, color, stereo sound
450 x 900 x 100 cm

2016

The Mysterious Island

2016
Wood, plastic, iron wire,
silk fabric, paint
Variable dimensions

2016
10000

Endless (Nights)
2016
10,000 copies of newspapers
Variable dimensions

2016

Papaya Daily
2016
Text, paint
Variable dimensions

2016

Everything (Baike)
2016
Durational performance
 Contents

66

82

96

116

140

187

Show Me Your Tricks Larys Frogier 66

No Ifs, Ands, or Buts Li Qi 82

The Post-Conceptual Conceptual Artist Pauline J. Yao 96

The Unnamed Xiaoyu Weng 116

Papaya Daily Heman Chong 141

Of Trees Ken Liu 195



Show Me Your Tricks

Larys Frogier

66


Displaced Space is too empty

Frustrated Object is too much
Overloaded Sound is too loud
Trapped Display is too artificial
Infiltrated Picture is too large
Excluded Transition is too disturbing
Controlled Emotion is too unstable
Freed
Manipulated
Responsible

Heman Chongs exhibition at the Rockbund The act of making an image in Heman
Art Museum brings the visitor to the Chongs art is never summed up as an
threshold of paradoxical emotions and immersive, seductive, narrative display.
concepts.

67


Read Tell but never tell the truth.

Act Gossip is gossip is gossip.
See Language is an act of translation, transition,
Consume transformation.
Crack
Talk Heman Chong deploys layers of texts
Think and images made up of disruptions,
Oppose contaminations, interruptions, extensions,
Withdraw combinations, and additions.

Solitude in the act of seeing is mixed in with
social and political address.
Heman Chong has an obsessive love of looping
texts and images as a disruptive process of
making and experiencing the picture.
In the darkened foyer of the Rockbund Art
Museum, the visitor confronts an erotic kind
of red and yellow neon sign flashing the
Chinese characters which mean
BOOKS BOOKS BOOKS but are pronounced
or written in Chinese pinyin SH SH SH .

68

Yet books has a similar sound to another
word that means LOSE LOSE LOSE. How
confusing
The BOOKS as a visual sign is soon
objectified in the reception lobby where
the museums souvenir area has been
transformed into a full bookshop. Visitors
will enjoy leafing through the books but
they will also quickly understand that the
majority of these books are related to the
law: laws about the law, laws of physics, laws
for inventing language, China and the law,
and so on. Really strange And moreover
this legal bookshop is subtly contaminated
with other books related to poetry, LEGO
1968
play, history, science fiction, art, and fantasy.
Upon invitation from Heman Chong, the
selection of all the books has been made
by Ken Liu, a speculative fiction writer, a
legal expert, a translator, and a programmer
who has blown up the codes of writing. The
contract and letters of such an agreement
are displayed on the wall in the bookshop.
It thus drives the viewer to another story
about a writer creating a legal bookshop.
The selection made by Ken Liu subverts the
bookshop into a heap of language (Robert
Smithson), a Babel spinning words about
legal regulations into super-fictions and into
an amazing reflection on the act of writing:
69

A text consists of multiple writings,
issuing from several cultures and
entering into dialogue with each other,
into parody, into contestation; but there
is one place where this multiplicity is
collected, united, and this place is not
the author, as we have hitherto said
it was, but the reader: the reader is
the very space in which are inscribed,
without any being lost, all the citations
a writing consists of; the unity of a text
is not in its origin, it is in its destination;
but this destination can no longer be
personal: the reader is a man without
history, without biography, without
psychology; he is only that someone who
70
holds gathered into a single field all the
paths of which the text is constituted.
Such observations from Roland Barthes in
his 1968 seminal essay The Death of the
Author are still valid in Heman Chongs
exhibition practice, especially in this legal
bookshop, but the difference is that the
act of writing is no longer obsessed with an
exclusive deconstruction of the text either
by the depersonalization of the writer or an
impersonal reader. On the contrary, there
is an authorship in excess: each author of
the book is carefully selected, mentioned,
exhibited; Ken Liu can also be perceived as
an author in fantasy-building/writing super-

fictions through other books. The concept/
practice of narrative is not denied but
pushed to its extreme possibilities engaging
the viewer/reader into dizzying fictional
loops. The viewer is thus warned: s/he
will emotionally experience, conceptually
recompose, and fully contribute to
fragmented stories that are waiting to be
reactivated through each floor of Heman
Chongs exhibition in the Rockbund Art
Museum.
So let us go straight up to the museums
sixth-floor caf where the space is bright
white and contrasts with the dark, dim
bookshop on the ground floor; trapped
into a platform surrounded by glass windows,
a performer is reading on his/her cell phone
the news of the day from Baidu Baike (Baidu
Encyclopedia) with the rule given by Heman
Chong to systematically browse a Baidu
Baike entry, clicking the fifth link of every
entry ad infinitum. The monotonous voice of
the reader is broadcast through speakers
all over the museum caf, where the visitor
can sit, walk around, and look through the
glass windows at the performer. But it is
really not easy to rest, chat, and socialize
in this pure white cube filled with sound.
In other words, the visitor is trapped into
a paradoxical relation with the reader: the
audience has the power, like in a panoptic
71

architectural structure, to control the
performer from the gaze; yet at the same
time s/he is nearly reduced to silence, being
overwhelmed and controlled by the voice
of the performer. In Everything (Baike) we
are facing the extreme saturation of space
with words, opposite to the spacing of
wording and reading claimed by Stphane
Mallarm or Marcel Broodthaers. However,
the emptiness of the exhibition space
creates another means of transforming and
spacing the language. Indeed, Everything
(Baike) highlights the relation of the visitor
to his/her position of uttering/producing/
swallowing words, language, and knowledge:
it becomes evident that the performance
72
does not merely break down to reading; it
fundamentally enacts reading as a practice
of translation, appropriation, rejection, and
alienation. Moreover, the act of reading is
not only performed by the performer but
in a way it is displaced by the visitor who,
by listening, has the choice to rephrase,
to be immersed in, to escape from, and to
select the continuous flow of words and
information. Everything (Baike) replays
the automatism/obsession of language as
the site of knowledge production, but it
simultaneously questions the conditions
of exchange/dissemination/control of
information. The utterance of the topics no
longer delivers fixed meaning and knowledge

of truth but rather propels traveling words.
By acting/reading what is supposed to be
encyclopedic knowledge, Heman Chong
brings back the question of thought and
speaking as a real process of subjectification
and alienation. As Jacques Derrida stated:
Because to speak is to know that thought
must become alien to itself in order to
be pronounced and to appear. It wishes,
then, to take itself back by offering itself.
Time to calm down. Descend to the fifth
floor. Take a look at this peaceful landscape
of short texts perfectly aligned and directly
silkscreened on the walls, which had all
been painted deep green. There is a real
pleasure in walking quietly along the balcony
and noticing some rather unusual stories
at times funny and at other times not
which are a collection of gossip the artist
has been collecting for fifteen years: love
stories, art business relations, professional
and personal conflicts, accidents, and so
forth. Some events seem really unreal and
yet it appears that each story is based on
true factsunless the author has perhaps
added some dramatic rhetoric. Who knows?
To render the stories even more ambiguous,
Heman Chong intervened in the texts by
withdrawing all dates, places, and names.
What is very efficient in such display is
73

the minimalist way of telling the stories
against the large green walls which create
a screen on which to receive the texts but
also a visual mental projection from the
viewers/readers of the tidbits of gossip: the
texts might operate as captions to absent
figures, characters, or scenes, much like
what one can easily find in newspapers or
magazines. But here there are no photos,
no paintings, no dates, no places, no names
save the green-painted wall to illustrate
the text. The viewer is brought back to his/
her social status as a reader, where the
picture and the text are supposed to tell
the truth. As we know, however, following
Roland Barthess writings on contemporary
74
mythologies, journalistic captions are
always added components that re-represent
reality to make it as true as possible. Yet
it is an impossible mission since reality
and photography and text are already
representations of something we cannot
pretend to know or to control.
Such an obsession with supervision and
manipulation can of course bring any art
institution, media group, administrative
structure, political organization to hold
the power of transforming reality into
a traumatic real with side effects like
distractive entertainment, censorship,
exclusion, monologue, propaganda... The

fourth floor of the Rockbund Art Museum,
normally bathed in full daylight with a high
elevation going up to the glass ceiling on
the seventh floor, is often used by artists
to display monumental and/or graceful
installations. Here, Heman Chong opted
for the opposite: the daylight has been
interrupted by a platform on the sixth
floor, while no artificial spotlight is used
to illuminate the space and the walls have
been entirely covered by dark grey. Entering
the space, the visitor experiences a strong
sense of desolation. Some visitors might be
overwhelmed by mixed emotions of sadness,
anxiety, and anger, shocked by the absence
of work in the way that the installation
displays the act of seeing emptiness rather
than the observation of the plentitude of
objects. It is of course false to say that
there is nothing in the space, since the
dark wall paintings are connected with
the visible installation of ten thousand
copies of blank newspapers stacked along
the walls or aligned to divide parts of the
exhibition space. It is nevertheless crucial
to first recognize emptiness as a decisive
component of Heman Chongs Endless
(Nights) installation. Indeed, the emptiness
is visually reinforced and materialized
with the newspapers since they contain
absolutely no pictures or texts inside, only
blank white pages of what is supposed to be
75
the exact reproduction of the time-honored
Singaporean newspaper the Straits Times. Let
us first then say that emptiness has nothing
to do with nothingness or meaninglessness.
Emptiness is fundamentally what builds a
space but moreover it has been and is still
used by architects and power structures to
manage our daily lives: large empty squares
are built to facilitate and control the flows
of people or serve as ideological sites for
the sake of celebrating a superpower, often
with a monument positioned in the middle
to commemorate a political, historical, or
spiritual figure; large empty spaces are built
in huge shopping malls to exalt the act of
consumerism; empty spaces are also highly
76
esteemed by museums to consecrate these
temples of optical bourgeois knowledge;
empty spaces are used by armies as no
mans land and of course as sites of wars
and crimes. Therefore, in Heman Chongs
installation, the challenging experience of
emptiness is never neutral or minimalist but
rather always has to do with an ideological
criticality. Though when the exhibition
opened, the space was perfectly neat
and clean, with the stacks of newspaper
somehow resembling protective ditches in
battlefields or primary structures, the more
the exhibition was used by the audience, the
more it became messy and uncontrollable.
Newspapers were snatched by visitors,
taken away as souvenirs or immediately
used to draw/write some messages, or torn
up and strewn all over the floor. There is
certainly this desire to immediately associate
the Endless (Nights) work with censorship,
which can be meaningful. But the wittiest
efficiency in Heman Chongs Endless (Nights)
is this amazing capacity to confront the
absence of words/pictures with the act of
writing: not only writing as literature or as
decorum, not only fiction or information as
an immersive experience, but writing as a
fundamental process of uttering the subject.
The emptiness of words in the newspaper
installation is actually full of free voices and
representations made by each of the visitors.
Endless (Nights) is an artwork title that
echoes another work produced by Heman
Chong for the exhibition: One Thousand
And One Nights, which consists of a light
box of the same title, in turn related to
the famous compendium of tales from the
Middle East. On the museum faade, the
text is written thrice, each in a different
language: Chinese, English, and Arabic. From
the 9 th century onwards, the tales have
been transmitted, adapted, recomposed,
translated, combined, and superposed from
Persia to India, from Western literature to
Asian and Chinese literature. The original
manuscripts already contain significant
differences between Egyptian and Syrian
77
versions, while colonialism later on has
significantly contributed to certain Western
representations and stereotypes about Arab
peoples in a schema known as Orientalism.
Chinese translations and adaptations have
also built new codes of representing the
Arab world as an unbelievable land with
a stereotyped imagination. No need here to
go into the details of the tales. Just walk on
the street and catch the three different titles
and languages claiming to imagine these
tales. Emblematic, problematic, exciting: the
titles draw invisible lines, frontiers, links, and
ruptures between languages, confronting the
viewer with the possibility/impossibility of
accessing other languages: what is the most
78
foreign language to what kind of foreign
stories? Exhaustingly exotic The work
One Thousand And One Nights visualizes
translation not only as an act of telling
stories from one language to another but as
a strategy of dropping titles that does not
attempt to identify the true title(s)/stories
of exoticism but rather to subvert these
stereotyped identities into crossing borders;
beauty is a foreign land that stands but one
meter from where I stand It is also a great
idea to label the exterior of the museum
building as an invitation to consider extended
spaces for translation: not only a place to
talk and experience the diversity of cultures
but a place to go through the contradictory
modes of representation, a place to critically
question the imaginary, and moreover a
platform to question the regimes of speech
as alternatives to dominant ideologies. It
creates new dynamics related to the usual
and rather boring acknowledgment of cultural
diversity, and foresees cultural reflections
and action in daily life as well as in the
contemporary colonized and globalized world.
In Le Rcit est un pige (The Narrative Trap)
the philosopher and theoretician of images
Louis Marin observes that any narrative holds
the power of truth, and yet such power has
generated doubt and suspicion. Nowadays,
nobody knows who is the one doing the
trapping or who is being trapped with/by
the narrative: the author or the reader?
In such an exchange, a double fiction, a
double simulacrum is unveiled: the power
in its own reflection and mise en abyme.
Heman Chongs art thus reveals such double
fictions, tracking any representation, speech,
or institution in order to display its hidden
structure of power. But the challenge is not
only to visualize such power structures; it
is also to have the utmost wit in radically
subverting it. Marin writes:
But one day, for one moment and for a
moment only, the weak, the submitted,
because he is smart and canny, finds
79
 the means to turn the force of power
against power, to divert it against itself,
and what an intense pleasure this is!
He does not contradict its own force: it
is impossible. He does not accuse it: it
is useless. He does not ask for the just
to be stronger: it is utopian. He finds
the wayartisanal dexterity, the art of
means and brief machinationsin which
power, by its own force, contradicts
itself, accuses itself, and states very
clearly and without any contestation
that it is itself profoundly unjust.
The Rockbund Art Museum expresses its
deepest gratitude to Heman Chong for
80
conceiving a unique art project for the
museum, producing brand new artworks
that have succeeded in challenging the
format of the art institution and the codes of
exhibition making, offering viewers a range
of unexpected, rare, critical, and emotional
experiences in such times of global
entertaining art.
Our warmest thanks go to our in-house
Senior Curator Li Qi who conceived of the
exhibition and edited this publication,
bringing into mainland China some
meaningful debates in order to advance the
possibilities of curatorial practice.
We also very warmly thank Ken Liu for
his invaluable contribution to the Legal
Bookshop (Shanghai) project and to the
publication with his brilliant text, as well as
the guest authors Pauline J. Yao and Xiaoyu
Weng for offering insightful perspectives on
Heman Chongs artistic oeuvre.

81


No Ifs, Ands, or Buts

Li Qi

82

Ifs, Ands, or Buts denotes the twists and
turns one deploys when making up a story,
an excuse, or an argument. As the title to
Heman Chongs solo exhibition at Rockbund
Art Museum, it was equally a project replete
with situations misplaced, a project overrun
by that realm between reality and fantasy. It
embraced the opposite ideas of what ought
to have happened.
A sense of the tease was there. On the
north faade of the museum, a light-box
installation reads One Thousand And One
Nights in Arabic, Chinese, and English,
affixing an uncanny, non-specific, and yet
accurate footnote to its specific locality in
2003-2012 LEM1
2012
Shanghainot least because the phrase has
long been adapted in Chinese as an idiom
that sarcastically dismisses a story or tale
as completely unbelievable. For pedestrians
on Huqiu Road (where the museum stands),
encountering the light box was anything but
expected. Such a mystification was intended.
From Stacks (200312) to LEM1 (2012),
Heman Chongs oeuvre cherishes the
possession and circulation of knowledge and
its physical incarnation(s). The collection of
books imparts a strong sense of security
that authority one finds in bookstores and
83

libraries. Yet it is a phantom of solace and
potentiality, surrounded as one is by books
that triumph ones capability of eventually
reading through all the pages in all those
books and imbibing the knowledge therein.
In this exhibition, Legal Bookshop (Shanghai)
replaced the museums gift shop on the ground
floor. The nature of the piece as an artwork
was often overlooked by the general audience,
until a while later they realized the books
that they were browsing did not quite fit an
ordinary art museumbooks about the legal
system in China. The artist hired a lawyer, Ken
Liu, to carry out the task of interpreting the
idea of law and selecting the books.
84
In addition to his capacity as a litigation
consultant for intellectual property cases,
Ken Liu is also a programmer as well as
an author and translator of speculative
fiction. His choice of books was personal
as he decided on the books without any
interference from the artist, the curator,
or anyone else in the museum, but his
multidisciplinary practice has meant that
the results turned out to be very satisfying.
There were some obvious choices, such as
Chinese-language law bookswith titles
like Laws and Regulations of the Peoples
Republic of China in Common Use, and The
Comprehensive Explanations of the Laws of
the Peoples Republic of Chinaalong with

books that introduce the idea of laws and
the history of law in China and elsewhere.
Yet at the same time, Liu made some
eclectic choices: chess manuals; treatises on
poetic prosody; volumes on programming
algorithms and game development; texts on
urban planning; guides for LEGO builders;
books on the principles of physics and laws of
nature; tomes on the governance of nations
and rules of economic development; titles on
social norms and etiquette; and publications
on philosophical enquiries concerning human
society. While some of the books selected
might be considered far-fetched (as far as
the relevance to law is concerned), such
impromptu choices generated a great deal
of space for interpretation: for instance,
the male chauvinism of programming, game
design, and rule making generally was
placed alongside the fact that most strictures
of social etiquette that target and constrain
women. The obvious departure from a
consistent theme amplified the presence and
contradictions of law in our daily reality.
While Legal Bookshop (Shanghai) deconstructed
the law as a system of rules governing human
society and as a body of text collectively
created and individually applied, a counterpart
of sorts, Everything (Baike), demonstrated
the attempt to read the Baidu Baike online
encyclopedia out loudyet another
85

1965
collective attempt that transcribes the total
sum of human knowledge into written
form. The encyclopedia provides names,
definitions, and descriptions to everything
recognized by the human mind and
associate one entry to another. Such online
encyclopedias in our present day exceed any
individuals effort, preference, and capacity,
accomplishing something both objective and
collaborative.
In Everything (Baike), an individual sat alone
in a space and read from a smartphone
screen. Beginning with the article of the
day on the Baidu Baike site, the actor goes
on from the article by clicking only on the
86
fifth link of that page. And so the actor
continues from one article to the next, and
so on and so forth. The performance was
repeated throughout the entire duration of
the exhibition. Not long into the reading, the
actors became overwhelmed by the amount
of information they were reciting out loud,
and the reading became a mechanical
process without any sensitivity to the
content. For those listening, the random-
seeming series of articles and phrases
would eventually form a parallel montage
always running to a close, and the content
would even evolve into an impression of
conspiracies.

Legal Bookshop (Shanghai) and Everything
(Baike) were both solid but paradoxical
endeavors. As an ideal, the law only becomes
legally real when its enforcement is backed
up by force. The law could be considered
as a common effort towards a preferred
reality, and yet the law was borne out of
chaos in the first place. The idea of law in
the bookstore could possibly be viewed as an
experimentation in the manner of Oulipoof
a freedom enabled precisely by constraints.
In that sense, Everything (Baike) was also
an Oulipian practice. The capricious and
content-irrelevant restriction of the fifth
link enabled an utmost randomnessof
extending this act of reading to potentially
any existing article in the ever-growing
online encyclopedia. The ironic contrast here
lies between the Sisyphean task of reading
and its predestined failure and a heroism
that elicits sympathy.
The law and the knowledge thereof
constitute progress in human society in
the pursuit of an ideal society. This ideal
society is not only a utopia in another place
or time but also an improvement in the
reality we constantly find ourselves in. Ideal
societies have been rehearsed over and over
again in fiction, across diverse cultures and
87

LED
languages. The Mysterious Island, located in
the exhibition, was an unexpected destination
of exile. Though the title referred to Jules
Vernes 1874 novel, the body of the work
a sad and unfulfilling restaging of Peach
Blossom Islandactually appropriated
from Jin Yongs wuxia classics. In Jin Yongs
novels, Peach Blossom Island was a site of
seclusion and cultivationas well as a place
of diaspora and otherness. On the island,
the peach blossom trees were arranged as
a labyrinth according to an ancient Chinese
form of divination.
As a utopian metaphor, such an island
might remind us of Singapore: an island
88
nation with its permanent residents made
up of generations of migrants, a nation that
only established itself in 1965 after being
expelled from the Federation of Malaysia.
People in Singapore are rooted in various
cultural backgrounds from Asia, while united
as Singaporeans.
As Jean Baudrillard described in LAmrique
(1986), from a European perspective,
America is a realized utopia, an offspring
of European legacy, and enabled itself with
new development by returning to a ground
zero. From a continental Asian perspective,
Singapore is perhaps Asias realized utopia.
On this island is a garden nationor better,
a bonsai nationin which all spectacles
are artificially created and arranged. One
could perhaps draw an analogy with Heman
Chongs work. In The Mysterious Island, the
peach blossom trees were purchased from
taobao.com and arranged in an orderly
manner, much like the stacks of goods or
products in any large, labyrinthine furniture
market. The clumsy, brightly colored plastic
trees were displaced by a backdrop of blue
wallsa blue often used in film production
as though intimating that the scenario can
rapidly switch, not to mention suggesting the
water that surrounds any island.
The state-owned press and media under
the governance of Lee Kuan Yew and his
family tell a story of a politically correct
reality. In Endless (Nights), the artist filled
the dimmed gallery with a monumental
sculpture made up of 10,000 copies of blank
newspapers, all neatly folded and piled up.
Exact replicas of the Straits Times (the best-
selling paper in Singapore), the newspapers
had all images and texts effaced from the
surfacea literal attempt at wiping out the
reality of Singapore as produced through
information. The artist invited viewers to
avail themselves of a copy of the newspaper
89
and to do with it as they please. This process
deconstructed what could be considered a
skeleton of reality along with the physicality
of monuments.
In the face of the blank newspaper and the
rejection of the desire to read and interpret,
viewers improvised by giving alternative
meanings to the paper, for instance by
drawing, writing, and making folded figures.
The most spontaneous reaction to the
artists invitation, however, was to destroy:
tearing up the paper as a violent reaction to
the uncertainty and insecurity in the absence
of contenta subconscious and collective
resistance, possibly. Like most revolutions
90
fired up by the multitude, political appeal
and strategic scheming cameif it ever did
only after a mass destruction of all.
Never is there one version of reality. Stories
were twisted, intercepted, edited, abridged,
and misread from the moment they appeared
to when they were written down and passed
on. Papaya Daily functioned both as a
collection of short stories and an installation.
Among the stories, one would find serious
reports, ridiculous protocols, and chicken
soup for the soul eventually ruining ones
mind, along with a definition of rumor and
a methodology of writing short stories.
This self-reflexive piece of work posed a
sharp contrast to the blank newspaper. The
stories, though never verifiable, comfort
and even please the viewer with just a small
hint of truth. They were exactly the kind of
stories that fulfilled our guilty pleasure of
conspiracy and affirmed the desired norms in
our collective mind.
and loud speakers amplified the image and
Poor Mr. Bean finds himself in utter
awkwardness. His attempt to dissolve his
gracelessness only makes us love him all the
more. Next to him, the Road Runner flees
from Wile E. Coyotes traps always doomed
to failure. The characters in the comedies
are always escaping from, or else stuck in,
a dilemmamuch the same situation as
one would encounter in a nightmare. Unlike
nightmares, however, these cartoonish
characters would always find a solution
to escape from dead ends in some way or
another. All this comforts the viewers with
relief. In Re-Re-Re-Run, the large LED screen
sound to an exhausting and appalling scale,
ripping away any last shred of soft-hearted
fantasies about escaping to an imaginary
worlda haunting work.
91
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2003 4 5 2010 4 5

2004 2010 4 5 2011 4 3

2005 4 4 2012 4 2

2006 4 5 2013 4 8

2007 4 7 2014 4 4

2008 4 4 2015 4 3

2009 4 5 2016 4 4

Thinking about Exhibitions, Understanding Media, The Stone Gods, A Portrait of the Artist as an Old Man,
Living in Singapore, An Artist of the Floating World Man in the Dark, Death with Interruptions
2003, 4 books and 5 glasses 2010, 4 books and 5 glasses

Foucault's Pendulum, The Elementary Particles, Too Brief a Treat, Cruising Paradise,
Pattern Recognition, What We Talk about when We Talk about Love Robinson Crusoe, Lord Jim
2004 (2010), 4 books and 5 glasses 2011, 4 books and 3 glasses

Everyday Life in the Modern World, The Map and the Territory, Roadside Picnic,
What Is the Artist's Role Today?, Protest, Intimacy The Maine Woods, The Last Thing He Wanted
2005, 4 Books and 4 perfume bottles 2012, 4 books and 2 glasses

Black Holes & Time Warps, The Possibility of an Island, The Savage Detectives, The New Life,
The Practice of Everyday Life, Voyage to the End of the Room Small Memories, Corridor
2006, 4 books and 5 glasses 2013, 4 books and 8 glasses

Against the Day, Stopping the Process?, Ministry of Moral Panic, Noli Me Tangere (Touch Me Not),
All Tomorrow's Parties, The Man in the High Castle The Waves, The Left Hand of Darkness
2007, 4 books and 7 glasses 2014, 4 books and 4 glasses

The Wind-Up Bird Chronicle, Elizabeth Costello, A Personal Anthology,

A Fall of Moondust, Correction, Blindness Alif the Unseen, Deliverance
2008, 4 books and 4 glasses 2015, 4 books and 3 glasses

Down and Out in the Magic Kingdom, The Book of Revelation, Hemingway on Fishing, The Crimson Petal and the White,
Eleven Kinds of Loneliness, The Book of Laughter and Forgetting Loneliness, The Petrified Planet
2009, 4 books and 5 glasses 2016, 4 books and 4 glasses

95


The Post-Conceptual Conceptual Artist

Pauline J. Yao

96

......
1960 1970
Conceptual art predicates itself upon
the extreme: extreme honesty, extreme
banality, extreme materials (or extreme
lack thereof), and at times, extreme
befuddlement. Often mistakenly viewed as
simplistic or straightforward, conceptual
art is far from that; in fact, such art excels
at being abstruse and difficult to penetrate
because it often (in an extreme way) does
not resemble art at all. Most Conceptual
art strives to be controversial insofar as it
seeks to question or challenge the domain
of art in the first place. One could say it is
art because it begins with a conceptmost
contemporary art made today could be
similarly described.
To be fair, the tactics we associate with
Conceptual arta steady if not heavy
reliance on readymade objects, careful
avoidance of gestural or personal expression,
a privileging of the idea, and a predilection
towards creating meaning via referencing
rather than depictingare quite
commonplace in the present art world. These
strategies, once synonymous with historical
Conceptual artists of the 1960s and 70s, have
become mainstays among contemporary
artists working today. Such circumstances
have led philosophers like Peter Osborne
to claim that all contemporary art is Post-
Conceptual. In Osbornes words:
97

Contemporary art is post-conceptual
to the extent that it registers the
historical experience of conceptual art,
as a self-conscious movement, as the
experience of the impossibility/fallacy of
the absolutization of anti-aesthetic []
in this respect, art is post-conceptual
to the extent to which it reflectively
incorporates the truth (which itself
incorporates the untruth) of conceptual
art: namely, art is necessarily both
aesthetic and conceptual.
Osbornes formulation is relevant here if only
to remind us that the contemporary artist
and the Conceptual artist have become
98
interchangeable for a reason; that is, artists
working today have been raised on a steady
diet of Conceptual art, which means they
privilege the idea but do not yet completely
disavow formal and aesthetic concerns.
Such may or may not be the case for the artist
Heman Chong. Chong adopts a somewhat
orthodox approach, be it in the strategies he
employs or the forms his art takes, namely
contractual agreements, certificates, text-
based painting, or performances based on
instructions. It is, in short, art that forces a
reexamination of the category of art. His art
does not abandon aesthetic considerations
altogether but rather enfolds them into
 2012
LEM1
LEM1
LEM1
the totality of his thinking; in other words,
aesthetics is neither ignored nor given a
space of undue importance. This approach
is blatantly pragmaticand also befitting
of a Conceptual artist working in a Post-
Conceptual landscape.
The first artwork that visitors encounter in
Ifs, Ands, or Buts extends throughout the
ground floor of the Rockbund Art Museum.
Legal Bookshop (Shanghai) occupies the
space of the museum kiosk, replacing its
usual fare of art magazines and exhibition
catalogues with a handpicked selection of
publications about the legal system in China.
The work was the result of a legal agreement
between Chong and Ken Liu, a litigation
consultant for intellectual property cases
and an acclaimed part-time fiction writer
and translator; the contract stipulated that
Liu would make a selection of books that
relate to the idea of the law and that these
would be offered for sale at the Rockbund
Art Museum. Indeed, the signed agreement
was framed and hung on the wall located
farthest from the entrance, which most
visitors possibly miss altogether. This was,
of course, partly the point. Visitors may or
may not have noticed that the selection of
books in the museum bookstore had taken
on a rather drier tone, favoring Chinese-
language law books with titles like Laws
99

LEM1 365
2004 -
2009
365
and Regulations of the Peoples Republic of
China in Common Use, The Comprehensive
Explanation on the Laws of the Peoples
Republic of China, among others. Operating
stealthily and being just under the radar of
detection is, of course, an implicit nod to the
core idea of selecting books that relate to
the idea of the law.
Legal Bookshop (Shanghai) operates on two
levels. The first concerns the format; it piggy-
backs onto an existing operation of the museum
and repurposes it as a work of art. As such, it
maintains a covert quality and can go unnoticed,
leaving open the potential of merging with
daily life. The second aspect concerns a built-
100
in contradiction: the use of a legal contract to
engage the services of a third party to perform
a task willfully ambiguous and open-endedin
other words, applying precision to an inherently
imprecise situation. The agreement between
Chong and his collaborator outlines the time
period, the number of books supplied, and
the fee; yet the core task of choosing books
that represent the idea of the law was left
purposely nebulous. The act of containing or
embedding extreme forms of ambiguity or
uncertainty within a highly structured set of
conditions is a signature feature within Chongs
artistic practice and the means by which he
continually juxtaposes the opposing registers of
subjectivity and objectivity.

-
1999 -
21
2008
,
The work bears distinct echoes to another
artwork Chong produced in 2012, entitled
LEM1 (A Science Fiction and Fantasy
Bookstore). LEM1 was a fully functioning
secondhand bookstore that temporarily
occupied Rossi & Rossi Gallery's London
outpost, transforming the gallery into a
space that exclusively sold science fiction
and fantasy titles. Aimed at undermining
the normal operations of a commercial
art gallery by attracting a wider (albeit
genre-specific) audience, LEM1 highlighted
systems of exchange and circulation, while
at the same time revealing Chongs own
personal fascination with science-fiction
literature. Science-fiction themes indeed
run throughout Chongs practicea fact
we may possibly attribute to the artists
upbringing in Singapore, an island city-
state with decidedly utopian (or dystopian)
social policies; or to the metaphoric parallels
between science fiction and contemporary
art, namely the creation of imaginary worlds,
speculative views into the future, and
deeply ingrained notions of stylistic forms
and plot conventions. In Chongs hands, sci-
fi is a stand-in for narrative as a whole
the act of storytelling being here an act of
diversion from daily life in the present, or
else a window into another place, time, or
dimension.
101

LEM1 was not the earliest incursion of
consumerist strategies into Chongs artistic
practice. God Bless Diana, a roving postcard
shop featuring some six thousand images
from the artists personal archive, was first
mounted at the Krller-Mller Museum
in 2004 before traveling to multiple other
venues. Commercial aspirations aside, the
model of a bookstore is for Chong not only
indicative of forms of exchange, circulation,
and redistribution, but of merging attributes
of limitlessness within clearly defined notions
of space and time. This signature mode of
Chongs excels at pairing utterly human
activities with specific, confined durations
of time. I think, too, of his earlier durational
102
performance from 2009 entitled A Short
Story about Geometry, in which Chong
invited selected audience members to sit
in a room with him as he trained them to
memorize a short story, word for word. Or
A Short Story Lasting 365 Hours (In Silence)
in which participants signed agreements
stipulating that they remain silent for one
hour each day for 365 days. At the crux of
all of these works is the factor of time, and
a desire to contain or encase the limitless
within a specific set of rules that dictate
where the artwork begins and ends.
If the ground floor of the Rockbund Art
Museum represents the extreme subjectivity

that is Ken Lius selection of books, based
on his interpretation of the idea of the
law, then the top floor can be seen to
represent an attempt at extreme objectivity.
Everything (Baike) is a performative work
that takes as its departure not only a totality
of information (Baidu Baike), but a surfeit of
data delivered in seemingly random order.
The durational performance of Everything
(Baike) is guided by a fiercely elemental set
of rules. Each performer begins by reading
out the first article entry on the homepage
of Baike (or Wikipedia, if performed for
English-speaking audiences) and when that
is completed, he or she moves to the next
article by clicking on the fifth link on that
page and proceeds to read that article aloud,
and so on. This highly choreographed and
emphatically non-expressive performance is
nothing short of an attempt to vocalize all
people, events, and locations in the world
in no particular order and according to a
random logic designed to grow exponentially
more tangential as it progresses. Designed to
be carried out by different readers over the
course of the entire exhibition, Everything
(Baike) riffs on On Kawaras peripatetic
performance One Million Years (1999). But
whereas On Kawara points to the passage
and marking of time through the reading
of printed volumes, Chongs effort takes a
decidedly 21st-century approach by tailoring
103
the work to the medium of the Internet
and its utterly endless production and
regurgitation of information.
Sandwiched within these two somewhat
formal exercises, each occupying opposing
poles on a spectrumthe spoken and the
printed, the limited and the limitless, the
material and the immaterial, the loud and
the silentare a host of other works that
position themselves in varying degrees along
this continuum. There are obscenely loud
video projections Re-Re-Re-Run and quietly
reflective, saccharine-tinged installations such
as The Mysterious Island, which presented
(artificial) peach blossoms in full bloom for
104
what appears to be eternity. And there is
Endless (Nights), one of the most obscure
presentations in the exhibition and arguably
the least accessible. In the stacks of 10,000
unprinted newspapers we can see Chongs
apparent, if not deliberate, referencing of
Felix Gonzalez-Torres, an artist who famously
spoke volumes through sculptures involving
nuanced forms, colors, and acts of generosity.
Knowing that the size of the papers was
calibrated to replicate the Straits Times, the
English-language newspaper in his native
Singapore, makes their blankness all the
more ominousis Chong hinting at a future
where media information has dwindled rather
than multiplied? Like many of Chongs other
works, it operates on the dual registers of
being simultaneously empty and full, present
and absent, finite and infinite. Such is equally
the case with Monument to the People Weve
Conveniently Forgotten (I Hate You) (2008),
an earlier installation piece by the artist
consisting of one million business cards
printed black and spread across the floor like
a thick carpet, in a gesture that acknowledges
acts of remembering and forgetting in equal
measure. And then placed just above Endless
(Nights) is Papaya Daily, a text-based work
awash in juicy innuendo and titillating
anecdotes. Presenting itself as an anthology
of gossip, Papaya Daily is composed of half-
truthsreal events with key details removed
so as to render them just shy of fact. Here
Chong places the trope of storytelling under
the magnifying glass by toying with degrees
of truth, acts of embellishment, and selective
subtraction to the point where veracity in any
form comes into question.
The questioning of truthand of assumptions
and assertions thereinis, of course, central
to the enterprise of conceptual art. Throughout
Ifs, Ands, or Buts we can find themes
endemic to Chongs practice: time, repetition,
narrative, fiction writing, extreme forms
of limitlessness, and extreme forms of
containment. Yet we find appeals to more
emotionally tinged registers as well: remembering
105
and forgetting, belief and deceit, affirmation
and contradiction, comprehension and
frustration. Indeed, some visitors may come
away vexed, since Conceptual art, perhaps
more than any other recent art movement, is
something that divides; people either love it
or hate it. One of the conceits of Chongs art is
that it is actually engaged in the act of creating
meaning. In fact, he emphatically prefers
remaining on the sidelines, pointing at objects
or ideas, drawing a fence around things rather
than talking about the thing itself. Where and
how the boundaries are drawn are important
sources of meaning but these remain equally
slippery and elusive.
106
A closing example would be the outdoor
text installation on the exterior of the
Rockbund Art Museum: One Thousand And
One Nights, rendered in three languages
English, Chinese, and Arabic. It points to
a story about stories, and to the idea that
ones life can be dependent on the telling of
stories, which provides a useful metaphor
for Chongs thinking. One Thousand And
One Nights can be framed as a commentary
on artistic survival and speaks to artists
desire to continue producing, making,
and narratingfor fear of going silent and
ceasing to be relevant. But as Conceptual
art has also taught us, such silence can
be seen to constitute an artistic act in
itself. We know that in Conceptual art the
means of artistic expression are infinite,
and the topics available for questioning
and discussion endless. Art of this kind has
always been more about the rules it sets
out and puts into play than the end results.
In Chongs case, this relentless search for
connections, progressions, and repetitions
is both futuristic and utopian. It can spiral
into a closed system or, more likely, it can
leave us standing breathless on the brink of
something potentially limitless and unknown.

107
108

20002004
550

-

God Bless Diana

20004
550 postcards
Variable dimensions
Installation view:
Kroeller-Mueller Museum, Otterlo, The Netherlands

109
 LEM1
2012
3000

LEM1 (A Science Fiction and Fantasy Book Store)

2012
Shelves, 3,000 secondhand books, store counter
Variable dimensions
Installation view: Rossi & Rossi, London, UK

110
111
112

2008
300gsm
9 5.5

Monument to the People We've Conveniently Forgotten (I Hate You)

2008
Offset prints on 300 gsm paper, approximately 1 million copies
Each measuring 9 x 5.5 cm (2.2 x 3.55 inches)
Installation view: South London Gallery, London, UK

113
114
 365
2012

365

365

A Short Story Lasting 365 Hours (In Silence)

2012
Durational performance, printed certificate

A performance by the collector of this work

lasting 365 hours: one consecutive hour each
day, for a year, where he or she must agree
to not speak for one consecutive hour during
waking hours. The cost of this work is 365
hours of his/her time spent in silence; hence, 2009
the cost of collecting this performance pays
for itself. 72-13

A Short Story about Geometry

2009
Durational performance
Installation view: 72-13, Singapore

115


The Unnamed

Xiaoyu Weng

116
......
[Y]ou must go on, I cant go on, you
must go on, I'll go on, you must say
words, as long as there are any, until
they find me, until they say me, strange
pain, strange sin, you must go on,
perhaps it's done already, perhaps they
have said me already, perhaps they have
carried me to the threshold of my story,
before the door that opens on my story,
that would surprise me, if it opens, it
will be I, it will be the silence, where I
am, I don't know, I'll never know, in the
silence you don't know, you must go on,
I can't go on, I'll go on.
Samuel Beckett, The Unnamable
Can an exhibition be a novel? A novel that
oscillates between a coherent narrative and
a constellation of fragmented plots, a novel
that is not narrated in voice but executed
by a nameless narrator with occasionally
inserted ramblings, a novel that develops
along the sequences of the events and the
spatial relationship of the galleries? It is not
surprising to see Heman Chongs longtime
fascination with literary works and the
relationship of text and image has propelled
his practice in recent years to evolve on
a larger scale, from single artworks to
exhibition-making. With the aforementioned
questions in mind, Chong has deliberately
maintained an ambiguous identity as an
117

WG
1995
2007 10
2015
artist, a curator, a writer, a moderator, a
collaborator, and a host in the processes of
conception and production in his projects.
Chongs adaptable identity, on the one hand,
allows him to test out different situations; on
the other hand, such versatility destabilizes a
singular and dominant artistic character and
signifies a withdrawal of different identities
altogether. Heman Chong turns into a
nameless narrator of his own exhibitions,
a narrator who appears as the double
of the author but who is not necessarily
or specifically identified as such. This is
particularly in the case of Chongs solo
exhibitions. Often employing a very personal
118
2015
tone, these exhibitions can be compared
to a kind of autobiography. Consider W. G.
Sebalds autobiographical fiction The Rings
of Saturn (1995). In the book, the unnamed
figure meditates on and guides readers
through episodes of history. Is the narrator
Sebald himself? Or is the 19th-century
German poet Friedrich Hlderlin actually
the one telling the story? Or rather, are
the recollections shared with those of the
translator Michael Hamburger? Such merged
voices generate a certain anonymity that
keeps the narrative in a state of perpetual
superposition between memoir (facts) and
fiction (imagination).

[...... ]
2014
1979
For his 2015 solo exhibition Never, A Dull
Moment at Art Sonje Center in Seoul, South
Korea, Chong impersonates the art space
as a middle-aged character who, through
this exhibition, tells the story of his identity
crisis of being a not-for-profit art institution.
Chong intends to blend his own identity
with that of the unnamed character and
the institution. The mid-life scenario and
the thirty-five-year mark mentioned in the
exhibitions press announcement hint at
Chongs personal details and point to a self-
referential and self-mocking kind of humor.
The exhibition is intimate and is indeed
about Chong as manifested by the work The
Art of Production (2015). On a small wall
shelf, one can find the upper part of a half-
cropped copy of Artforums October 2007
issue. The seemingly perplexing display cites
a personal anecdote of the artist; this issue
was once one of Chongs favorites of the
magazine because it discussed the collective
process of production in contemporary art
and he had kept a copy (untrimmed) by his
bed for eight years. But the more he read
through the issue, the more he developed
an existential crisis as he started to question
why artists needed to produce anything
in the first place. The action of cropping
expresses his discontent. Together with the
fragmented information left on the remaining
119
 e-flux 1998
e-flux
9
e-flux
part of the cover, the gesture of cropping
reinforces such skepticism as to what could
be read after The Art of Production. Yet
it is uncertain whether the answer can be
found in the missing part of the cover either.
In other pieces in the exhibition, Chong is
able to weave his personal artistic thinking
and practice into the fabric of the history of
an art institution. He claims that a temporary
wall left over from one of Art Sonjes 2014
exhibitions was part of his exhibition, and
for another piece entitled Within, You
Remain (2015), the artist has instructed Art
Sonjes staff to keep the debris from the de-
installation of the exhibition held prior to
Never, A Dull Moment. In doing so, the
120
e-flux
e-flux
identity and life of the artist, the unnamed
character as an art space, and the actual
institution are in the constant and dynamic
flux of mutual assimilation.
In his 1979 text Otobiographies: The
Teaching of Nietzsche and the Politics
of the Proper Name, Jacques Derrida
provides an intriguing commentary on the
relationship between the life and work
of philosophers. He introduces the concept
of the border to question the categorical
separation of the two in the reading of their
works, especially autobiographies:

e-flux
e-flux
e-flux e-flux
This borderlineI call it dynamis
[] is most especially not a thin
line, an invisible or indivisible trait
lying between the enclosure of the
philosophemes, on the one hand,
and the life of the author already
identifiable behind the name, on the
other. The divisible borderline traverses
two bodies, the corpus and the body,
in accordance with laws that we are
only beginning to catch sight of.
It might be interesting to look at the field
of contemporary art through the lens of
Derridas reflection. Although in art history,
the reading and writing of art do often
2015
alternate between formal analyses and
biographical investigation, the interpretation
and reception of an artists work today
has become increasingly inseparable from
not just his/her personal life but also a
much more complex set of parameters of
infrastructures and social connections.
Chongs practice resonates. If the questions
used to be, Is there only art, or are there
only artists? Chong has extended the
contemplation to Is there only art, or only
artists, or neither of the above but only
museums, art institutions, exhibitions,
display apparatus, wall texts, and press
releases?
121

While the practice of institutional critique
despises and chastises art institutions
established systems and a certain
bureaucracy they entail, Chong stages a clash
between such a bureaucracy, the production
of artworks, and the making of an artist; the
dismaying outcome is not that bureaucracy
might impair the presentation of art but that
the making of an artwork or even an artist
today can very much be an effect of such
systems.
Consider the phenomenon of e-flux
announcements. Founded as an art project
in 1998, e-flux soon caught the first wave
of digital marketing and developed into a
122
platform for the dissemination of exhibition
press releases with a set advertisement fees
paid by the organizers of the exhibitions
each time they wished to post. On a daily
basis, a limited number of email newsletters
featuring the press releases of upcoming
exhibitions from around the globe land in
subscribers email inboxes, with the titles
and venues highlighted in the subject lines.
Publishing with e-flux is highly desirable and
it is often booked out many weeks or even
months in advance during the high seasons
of the art world, thanks to its network
of over 90,000 visual arts professionals
subscribed to the email service. Most
importantly, browsing through a series of

2006
2012
2013
2013 Spring
2012
e-flux announcements, for a subscriber who
resides outside of the regions where the
exhibitions take place, generates a bizarre
yet satisfying illusion: as if glancing at the
titles and venues of these exhibitions could
already fulfill a physical viewing experience
and enables one to feel as informed and
professional as an international jetsetter.
Therefore, e-flux has become the mouthpiece
of not one particular art institution but
an amalgamation of the affairs of the art
world, a collective identity, and an ultimate
power system that is parasitic on the larger
organism. An artists name is made by hits
on e-flux.
For the announcements of two of his recent
exhibitions, Chong hacked this system in his
particular way. In the press text for Never, A
Dull Moment at Art Sonje Center, an artist
narrates his desire to turn an exhibition
into a short story. Soon the identities of
the narrator and the art space become
interchangeable. Only in the later paragraphs
are Heman Chong and Art Sonje Center
introduced in the press releases standard
About section for biographical details.
Going a step further, the e-flux announcement
for his most recent solo Ifs, Ands, or Buts
at the Rockbund Art Museum in Shanghai is
an absurd write-up about a gossip column
and a teaser of four tidbits of gossip news it
123

2011
2011
1971
once featured. Only the title, duration, and
museum coordinates (such as website and
logo) hint at the connection to the actual
exhibition, which could very well have been
e-fluxs publishing requirement that Chong
could not avoid. This gossip column turned
out to be an actual artwork in the show.
Entitled Papaya Daily (2015), this text-based
piece humorously sends off Apple Daily, a
tabloid-style newspaper published in both
Hong Kong and Taiwan and famous for its
celebrity gossip and brash news coverage. In
the gallery, a selection of the news clippings
from the gossip column is silk-printed on the
wall. In its short format, the news reports on
124
everyday sensations ranging from naming a
cockroach after ones ex-lovers to conducting
rituals that purportedly could fix problems
with the water leaking in a haunted museum.
The content of this popular column turned
out to be mostly urban myths, fabricated
by unnamed journalists and without any
news value. But the story of the Papaya
Daily extends to a crucial reflection on a
societal-wide pathology of the contemporary
condition: the explosion and acceleration of
information. The gossip columns acclaimed
success in fact alludes to the symptoms of
our existence: short attention spans, fear
of missing out, and difficulty in processing
complex ideas. For Chong, the act of

1953
inserting a seemingly eccentric text into the
e-flux announcement expresses the anxieties
of the contemporary art world: how to catch
the attention of others amid the maelstrom
of exhibition announcements? If Walter
Benjamin was concerned about the aura of
artworks disappearing into reproductions,
the aura now has no physical format to which
to be attached. Or perhaps the substance of
the aura has been replaced by another kind
of experience, the experience of talking,
gossiping, speculating, and circulating
information on art.
Some of Chongs works and projects
are participatory in nature. Instead of
attaching labels to his work or shouting
out concepts derived from the discourse of
relational aestheticssuch as discursive
events, social practice, participatory,
the performativeChong transforms
spectators into his collaborators, often
in a spontaneous and unclaimed manner;
on other occasions, the roles of the artist
and the collaborators are exchangeable.
For Chong, there is no such concept as a
general audience. His practice actively
shapes the kinds of audience in the process
of interaction.
For Endless (Nights) (2015), a site-specific
installation for the exhibition Ifs, Ands, or
125
Buts, Chong creates a somber environment
dimly lit by indirect lighting sources. Visitors
enter the space and stumble onto bundles
of newsprints stacked on the floor. They
can pick a copy up and take it home free of
chargeonly to discover immediately that
there is no content printed on it. Endless
(Nights) is metaphorical as it insinuates
the paradoxical condition as faced by the
news business. On the one hand, censorship
in countries such as China and Singapore
has made news reportage a propaganda
apparatus, with only form but no content. On
the other hand, the dark atmosphere signals
a gloomy future for the material corpus of
news ; when the digital completely replaces
126
the physical, news would be detached from
paper, and newspaper would return to its
original states as pure paper. But only the
visitors behavior completed the artists
intention: their frustration towards the blank
pagesin other words, useless objectshas
led to the crumpling of the blank newsprint,
jettisoned on the gallery floor. A few days
into the exhibition, the entire floor had been
covered by crumpled paper, transforming
the gallery space into a chaotic site of paper
waste. For Endless (Nights), as an artist,
Chong only set up a potential space where
stories have been filled and activated by his
visitors, and now, collaborators.
Chong has collaborated with many
practitioners in the field. He has written
novels collectively with writers, curators,
and artists (PHILIP, 2006, with Mark Aerial
Waller, Cosmin Costinas, Rosemary Heather,
Francis McKee, David Reinfurt, Steve
Rushton, and Leif Magne Tangen), organized
one-on-one lessons taught by student-
teachers (Advanced Studies in... (Ten Lessons
for Life) during Singapore Arts Festival, in
2012, with Zora Imani-Smith, Chaice Ng Hui
Lin, Rachel Chew, So Jia Yu, Megan Augustin,
Raphael Yee, Marcus Yee, and Phoebe
Chin), produced conferences (Stories and
Situations: The Moderation(s) Conference
at Witte de With Center for Contemporary
Art, in 2013, with Lee Ambrozy, Brian
Castriota, Chris Fitzpatrick, Amira Gad,
Vincenzo Latronico, Christina Li, Vincent
Normand, Orr Rosemary, Xiaoyu Weng, and
Arnisa Zeqo) and residencies (A Fictional
Residency at Spring Workshop, in 2013,
with Nadim Abbas, Oscar van den Boogaard,
Enoch Cheng, Doretta Lau, and MAP Office),
created installations (Interview(s) #1 #50
at Wilkinson Gallery, 2012, with Anthony
Marcellini), among many others. Most
recently, Chong invited Ken Liu, a science-
fiction writer, translator, and lawyer, to
create the project Legal Bookshop (Shanghai)
in 2015, through which they transformed
the first-floor space of the Rockbund Art
127
Museum into a temporary bookstore over
the duration of the exhibition Ifs, Ands,
or Buts. Liu was instructed by Chong to
compile a list of books touching on the idea
of the law both literally and speculatively.
The books were gathered and made available
for purchase at the store. It is of course not
extremely novel to create a piece of artwork
by programmatic instruction. But what
distinguishes Chongs collaborative process
are the ripple effects and the generative
powers. Chongs abstract thinking on the
possible intersections between legal issues
and creativity is materialized by Liu and
subsequently, through an infrastructure such
as the bookstore, distributed, circulated,
128
and further developed by the visitors.
Like a good virus, a single idea can thus
multiply, permeate, and take effect gently
and organically. Instead of forcing something
politically sensitivesuch as the legal
system in Chinaon visitors, Legal Bookshop
(Shanghai) functions precisely as a starting
point for such generative powers.
Chongs growing interest in collaboration
also reflects his long-term distrust in
individualism or the overstated value of
individualistic behavior. In Roadside Picnic
(2011), a durational performance presented
at the 2011 Performa Biennial in New York,
Chong would meet with each participant
for three minutes to allow them to tell
him something about themselves. Based
on this brief encounter, Chong would then
recommend a novel for them to read as
though each individual experience was
specially tailored. However, the whole set-
up turned out to have been a hoax as Chong
in fact recommended the exact same book
Arkady and Boris Strugatskys Roadside
Picnic (1971)to everyone. The plot was
not revealed in public until a journalist
shared her experience in a New York Times
review on that years Performa events. It was
unclear how the other participants reacted
when they found out about their identical
treatment. But Chongs whimsical action
challenges the notions of intersubjective
intimacy, connection, and trust. At the same
time, he revokes the self-indulgent and
illusionary satisfaction of so-called unique
individual experiences, which for the artist
are a modern construction. After all, as
hinted by the premise of the novel, humans
are just anonymous little beings who are not
even visible to the extraterrestrial visitors.
Chongs collaborative approach and his
skepticism of authorship do not cancel
out the subjectivities of his practice. He
considers art more of a subjective inscription
than an objective form. As Derrida suggests,
it is with the ear of the other (i.e., readers)
129
that determines the signature of the author;
Chong invites his audiences and collaborators
to proliferate signatures and subjectivities,
which makes a singular named character
impossible: he is everyone and no one at
the same time. Chong always enjoys the
interplay of what Jacques Rancire would call
a sentence-image relationship: the sentence
is not the sayable and the image is not the
visible [T]hey undo the representative
relationship between text and image.
Chong creates suspenseful images with
imbedded storylines and makes texts that
compel one to form scenarios and pictures
in his/her own head. There is no attempt to
represent through image and text; instead,
130
the effort lies on a constant mediation
of the conditions of the anticipatory, the
ambiguous, the incidental, the contextual,
the referential, and the peripheral.
Chong often casually talks about the desire
to write a full-length novel, though the
ambition has yet to be materialized. However,
if the artist considers his recent exhibitions
as chapters of a novel, then the grand idea
is indeed moving forward in a non-book
form. There is an unnamed character in
each of these exhibitions and projects. In
Samuel Becketts The Unnamable (1953) the
unnamed character speaks relentlessly from
an unspecified space, in order to seek his
own existence. What if Chongs story is a
fable? It is the allegorical and the unnamable
that lend themselves to an existential query
of art, of an effort to negotiate the realness
of the existence of art.

131
132

2015
2007 10
26.8 13.4

The Art of Production

2015
Altered found object (Copy of Artforum, October 2007)
26.8 x 13.4 cm
Installation view: Art Sonje Center, Seoul, South Korea

2011
2015



Roadside Picnic
2011
Performance involving a conversation between Within, You Remain
two individuals in private: an exchange of 2015
something personal about themselves for a Leftover bits from previous exhibitions, instruction
personalized book recommendation which turns for institution to never clean the floor during entire
out to be always Roadside Picnic duration of exhibition
Installation view: Tate Modern, London, UK Installation view: Art Sonje Center, Seoul, South Korea

133
134

2012


SOTA

Advanced Studies in... (Ten Lessons for Life)

2012
Workshop and durational performance
Performed by Zora Imani-Smith, Chaice Ng Hui Lin, Rachel Chew, So
Jia Yu, Megan Augustin, Raphael Yee, Marcus Yee, and Phoebe Chin
Commissioned by Singapore Arts Festival, Singapore
Installation views: SOTA Gallery, Singapore

135
 #1#50
2012

100 50

Interview(s) #1#50
2012
In collaboration with Anthony Marcellini
Mixed-media objects
Approximately 100 x 50 cm
Installation views: Wilkinson Gallery, London, UK

136
137

2006

PHILIP
2006
A novel collectively written by Mark Aerial Waller, Cosmin Costinas,
Rosemary Heather, Francis McKee, David Reinfurt, Steve Rushton,
Heman Chong, and Leif Magne Tangen
Curated by Mai Abu ElDahab and Tessa Giblin
Published by Project Arts Center, Dublin, Ireland

138
139


Papaya
Daily


This is a short story about a gossip

column called Papaya Daily. For
ten years, the journalist penned
the column for a newspaper. Over
time, his daily column became a
popular novelty for readers of
the newspaper. But little did they
know that the stories he wrote
were a mix of fact and fiction and
that most of them were based
on blatant lies. Readers were
addicted; they needed small but
spectacular escapes from their
daily lives. His editor was a lazy
old man who refused to fact-check
anything the writers brought in.
Therefore, he was free to make
up most of his stories based on
the small bits and pieces he would
gather from old magazines and
newspapers, updating the stories
with slight changes and minor
twists. For ten years, he wrote
whatever he wanted.
40

1970

For 40 years, the woman has

never seen her neighbor. And
she never will. Behind the
door of an old house lived a
well-known novelist who has
just passed away last night.
His novels have been read by
millions of peoplestories
about the lives of young
migrants from the countryside
who find both happiness and
sorrow in the city. Besides
being known as a writer, he is
also famous for having never
left his house since he
started writing in 1970.
He relies solely on one of
his childhood friends, who
helps him buy groceries from
the supermarket, cleans his
house, and sends mail to his
publishers.

20

Three days ago, a young

girl, possibly in her 20s,
was found dead in a
five-star hotel room. Her
identity is unknown, not
because she didnt carry
any personal identification
but because she had more
than three cards, all with
the same photograph but
with different names on
them. The police suspects
that this girl is a
professional mistress
who assumes different
identities to carry out
different relationships
with various men.


A man was arrested at

the airport yesterday. On
the flight, the currently
unidentified man broke
into a wild dance.
Apparently, he found an
Ecstasy pill in the pocket
of his jacket while
queuing up to pass
through immigration and
security. He got nervous
about the pill and
decided to swallow it. He
began to talk rapidly to
the people around him.
He danced to the music
played during take-off.


20

In an attempt to take her

own life, a woman jumped
into a lake after her
husband refused to buy her
a handbag she wanted. She
was spotted by a crowd of
people after being in the
cold water for 20 minutes.
They tried to coax her out
of the water and even threw
her a life buoy. But she
refused. Her husband
turned up and shouted at
her to get her out of the
water. He eventually jumped
into the lake and began to
strangle her while shoving
her face in the water. The
police intervened.
20

A contemporary art gallery has been

invaded by 20 gangsters. A week ago, a
woman claiming to be the landlords wife
turned up demanding that the rent be
paid directly to her. She cited her recent
divorce to the landlord as the reason. The
gallery refused her terms, and yet could
not contact the landlord, since his mobile
phone line appears to be permanently
terminated. She returned 2 hours later
with 20 gangsters. One of them managed
to overpower the security guard in the
space and even stabbed him with a blunt
knife. The security guard survived and
is now recovering in the hospital. The
gangsters sat around on the floor in the
gallery, stating that they would not leave
until the gallerist complied with the
demands of the landlords wife. The gallery
called the police, who turned up after a
couple of hours. They fought. The police
lost. As of today, the gangsters remain
in the gallery, and have even started to
cook their meals inside the space, filling
the air with a delicious aroma.


10

Two weeks ago, the police

received a call from a
witness who claims to have
seen a woman pushing a
child on a swing in a park for
at least three days.
The three-year-old boy has
since died from dehydration
and hypothermia after being
exposed to temperatures
of 10 degrees Celsius over
several nights. The
woman who pushed him on
the swing was his mother.
She is currently under
arrest in a hospital. She
claims not to have
remembered anything that
happened.


16

300

From today onwards, all

references to time travel will be
banned on official media,
including all films and television
programs. This is a reaction to a
situation where many young girls
are attempting to travel back in
time to find the love of their lives,
a historical character who only
exists in a television drama. In
the drama series, a girl
accidentally time travels when
she jumps off a building, falling
into a wormhole. She wakes up
and finds herself in the 16th
century and is later embroiled in
a heated romance with the lead
character. Since then, there have
been at least 300 time-travel
attempts by girls in the country,
with numerous fatalities.


A newly built museum was plagued by a
series of small infrastructural accidents,
mostly involving water. After a string of
incidents deemed too much of a coincidence
by the building team, at their wits end, one of
the team members suggested consulting a
Taoist priest. The priest arrived one morning
and started walking around the museum. He
visited the different spaces where water had
somehow seeped into the walls or the floors.
He told the building team that he sensed a
presence and asked for an iPhone. He googled
for any past activities involving deaths in the
museum and, sure enough, there had been
an accident involving the collapse of a floor
and two construction workers were killed. He
then proceeded to set a date later that week
to conduct a ritual to contact these spirits. In
that ritual, he made contact with one spirit
who haunted the building: vengeful, seeking
blood. The priest asked if he could trade red
wine for blood. The spirit agreed.
Unfortunately, water continued to seep into
the walls. Further negotiations are currently
taking place.

840

UFO

Last night, an unidentified

flying object forced the airport
to cease operations. A flight
crew preparing for descent first
detected the object around 8:40
p.m. and notified air traffic
control. Civil aviation authorities
responded within minutes,
grounding outbound flights and
diverting inbound ones to other
airports. Though normal
operations resumed an hour
later, the incident captured the
attention of the media and
sparked a firestorm of
speculation over the identity
of the UFO, with speculations
ranging from a hidden bomber to
a new missile or aircraft
being tested out to, of course, a
giant alien mothership. Eighteen
flights were affected.


A week ago, an elderly

woman died in a McDonalds.
No one noticed her for
seven hours because they all
thought she was asleep.
Recently, more and more old
people have been observed
spending their days and
nights at several branches of
McDonalds. They would
gather and talk to each
other, and when night
comes, they tend to spend
the night there. The
employees at McDonalds are
even kind enough to dim the
lights after 2 a.m. so that the
elderly can rest better.

1978

1980

Neu-
ordnung

The name of the band Joy

Division was appropriated
in 1978 from the name of
the section of a Nazi
concentration camp which
housed prisoners brutally
forced into prostitution. In
1980, this band later become
New Order, the name again
appropriated from a Nazi
source, this time referring
to Hitlers idea of the
Neuordnungthe grounding
principle of a fascist state.
On both occasions, the band
denied any references to the
Nazis.


This is a conversation that happened

between a US senator and a general
from the Philippines about the official
seal of the United Nations.
We all know what it looks like. It has a
world map with a radar-like grid cast
over it, flanked by two Greek laurels.
Apparently, the Filipino general had
the chance to look at it before it was
finalized and threw a fit, screaming,
WHERE IS THE PHILIPPINES ON THE
MAP? The US senator who was tasked
with the design meekly replied, Im
sorry. Its too small to be included. If
we put in the Philippines it would be no
more than a dot, to which the
Filipino general shouted back, even
louder, I WANT THAT DOT! Today,
if you look closely at the UN seal, you
will find a tiny dot between the Pacific
Ocean and the South China Sea.


2015
113
A rumor is a tall tale of explanations of events cir-
culating from person to person and pertaining to an
object, event, or issue in public concern. In the social
sciences, a rumor involves some kind of a statement
the veracity of which is not quickly or ever confirmed.
In addition, some scholars have identified a rumor as a
subset of propaganda. Rumors are also often
discussed with regard to misinformation and
disinformation (the former often seen as
simply false and the latter seen as deliberately false,
though usually from a government source given to the
media or a foreign government). Rumors thus have
often been viewed as a particular form of other
communication concepts. The German psychologist
William Stern experimented on rumors involving a
chain of subjects who passed a story from mouth to
ear without the right to repeat or explain it. He found
that the story was shortened and changed by the time
it reached the end of the chain. Robert Knapp defines a
rumor as a proposition for belief of topical reference
disseminated without official verification.
So, formidably defined, rumor is but a special case of
informal social communications, including myth,
legend, and current humor. From myth and legend it
is distinguished by its emphasis on the topical. Where
humor is designed to provoke laughter, rumor begs for
belief. This text is adapted from the Wikipedia entry
on the word rumor, accessed on November 3, 2015.


Days before his death, the

writer gave specific
instructions to a very close
friend of his about how he
would like his last novel to
be published. The five parts
within the novel would each be
published as different books,
at the rate of one per year.
He had a clear idea of the
order of the parts to be
published. These instructions
were later overturned by his
literary executor, without a
clear reason. Nobody will ever
know the entire truth of the
matter. Just think of the six
blind men and the elephant.


Speculations mount as to why the

director of the museum abruptly quit
her job and moved away from the city.
The latest one to land on the scene
concerns a notorious member of the
board of the museum, a man known
to have strong ties with the underworld.
Apparently, in the middle of a board
meeting, the board member produced
a photograph of a painting that is held
in the collection of the museum and
politely asked the museum director
to deaccession the painting and to
place it in the upcoming charity auction
so that he can buy it. The museum
director, in shock, immediately
refused. The board member produced
a golden revolver and placed in on
the table, and repeated his words.
The museum director ran out of the
room screaming while the remaining
board members fell silentone of
them nonchalantly flipping through
the pages of an art magazine.
747-200F

14

747-200F1991

777

The airport posted an advertisement

today in the newspapers requesting
the unknown owner of three Boeing
747-200F planes to reveal who he or
she is and to make preparations to
retrieve them. If the owner doesnt
retrieve them in the next 14 days, the
airport will sell or dispose of the
aircraft and use the money to cover
the expenses of storing the planes.
The Boeing 747-200F have been out
of production since 1991 and will
have very little resale value. Many
airlines prefer to invest in models
like the 777, which are much more
fuel efficient. The owner of the
planes has probably done the math
and realized that the cost of the
parking fees for the planes will now
be more than what the planes are
worth.
2013

6126
12306
In 2013, a five-year-old girl
named Safyre Terry suffered
severe burns and lost her right
hand and left foot in a tragic
fire caused by an arsonist. Her
father and three younger
siblings perished in the same
fire. Her life was spared thanks
to her father who used his
body to shield her from the
flames. She currently lives with
her aunt, Liz Dodler, who has
bought a tree to hang holiday
cards on. Safyre would love to
see the tree fill up with cards.
Please send her a card during
the holidays.

Safyre
P.O. Box 6126
Schenectady, NY 12306 USA


2011

10

One of the most

innovative and highly
successful fundraising
programs of a public
zoo exists at the
Bronx Zoo in the USA.
Since 2011, every
year during the
lead up to Valentines
Day, you can name
a cockroach at the
Bronx Zoo in New
York after one of your
ex-lovers for a mere
10 USD.
710

24

The small cells each measured

7 by 10 feet. He was sometimes
naked and sometimes
handcuffed for weeks on end.
Sometimes his ankle was
chained to a bolt on the floor.
Some of the cells have a small
toilet, sometimes its just a
bucket. There is always a
video camera watching his
every move. The lights are
always on. 24 hours a day,
speakers pumped in music or
static noisenot that it was
possible to know whether it
was day or night. He was never
told where he was, or when he
might be freed. He stopped
eating, but they force-fed him
liquid food with a tube through
his nose and into his stomach.

56
64203

The dimensions for coffins for

cremation in Singapore are
a maximum of 56 cm deep,
64 cm wide, and 203 cm long.
From time to time, a relative
of the deceased would attempt
to save some money by buying
a coffin from China, Malaysia,
or Vietnam. Sometimes,
because it is cheaper, they
would often choose a
larger coffin or one that
contains many decorative
elements, and these coffins
would not fit into the furnace.
They would then have to
resort to buying one that can
fit, with the result that the
unused coffin would have to be
transported home.

910

1.
2.
3.

4.
5.
6.

7.

8.

On pages 9 and 10 of his book Bagombo

Snuff Box: Uncollected Short Fiction,
Vonnegut listed eight rules for writing a
short story:

1. Use the time of a total stranger in such

a way that he or she will not feel the time
was wasted. 2. Give the reader at least one
character he or she can root for. 3. Every
character should want something, even if it
is only a glass of water. 4. Every sentence
must do one of two thingsreveal
character or advance the action. 5. Start as
close to the end as possible. 6. Be a
sadist. No matter how sweet and innocent
your leading characters, make awful things
happen to themin order that the reader
may see what they are made of. 7. Write
to please just one person. If you open a
window and make love to the world, so to
speak, your story will get pneumonia.
8. Give your readers as much information
as possible as soon as possible. To heck
with suspense. Readers should have such
complete understanding of what is going
on, where and why, that they could finish
the story themselves, should cockroaches
eat the last few pages.
187
btr

I:548-552

liber -bri ,

12

 188

189

#





 190

191

#




















 # 192

193 #

......



8:23-24
195 Of Trees
Ken Liu

vix prece finita torpor gravis occupat artus,

mollia cinguntur tenui praecordia libro, in
frondem crines, in ramos bracchia crescunt,
pes modo tam velox pigris radicibus haeret, ora
cacumen habet: remanet nitor unus in illa.
Ovid, Metamophoses, I:548-552

liber -bri, m. the inner bark of a tree.

TRANSF., as this was used by the
ancients as a material upon which
to write: (1) a book, writing, treatise.
(2) a book, a division into which a
work is divided.
Cassell's Latin Dictionary

Sometimes, when the season is warm and

the sun lingers over the western hill, he visits her.

He would prune away the desiccated

leaves and the crooked husks of dead branches.
She would give a little yelp sometimes when his
hands slip and he cuts too deeply. He would 196
apologize, terrified that he has hurt her, but she
would reassure him immediately and tell him
to continue. She desires to be beautifulas the
exiled Roman poet would one day tell us: that
bright, shimmering beauty was the only part
left of her former self.

He piles up the cuttings under her

verdigris hair, fragrant and dripping with amber
sap when the sun has retreated behind the
clouds on the horizon. Setting the small pile
aflame, he breathes in its spiraling smoke and
coughs while seeing visions in his tears. She
greedily devours the smoke from the exfoliated
remains of her body, the way one would drink
the blood from a wound in their own limb. If
there is time, he would tell her stories and then
arrange the dried sap trails on her skin into
letters, words, paragraphs of longing.
This is how books are written.

Sometimes, when it has rained and the

world feels brand new, he makes love to her.
As he approaches under her canopy, the
unceasing rustling of her leaves grows silent for
a moment before resuming with a new rhythm.
He listens to her, imagining a hundred plaints
and wishes, half-obscured by her thousand
tongues. With his pruning shears, he cuts off a
pliant branch. The dripping sap soon congeals,
and she sighs with the pain of creation that
neither of them wants to describe as pain.
He places the branch on the ground,
197 still wet from the rain. It sinks, pulled down
by the weight of its mortality. And as the earth
envelops it, the muddy clumps climbing over
and clinging to each other, he stands back, tense
with anticipation. The form emerging before
him is different each time, depending on the
time of the year and the shape of the cutting
he planted, but above all, he believes and she
affirms, it depends on her mood.
Meanwhile, she has draped her limbs
around him as well as this severed part of herself
like a bower, the congealing darkness lit up
by his golden glow. In the enclosed space, the
fragrance of her honeyed sap is overwhelming,
almost unbearable. He breathes deeply and
with great difficulty expels the viscous sweetness
from his lungs.
Sometimes the apparition resembles a
woman, with discernible limbs and hollowed-
out eyes. With his hands on the warm mud,
the smooth brown skin gives and envelops his
searching fingers. Overwhelmed by ardor, he
kisses her, and those parts of her melt away
to bitter slush on contact with his tongue.
When he sinks into her he feels like he is being
buried alive, and her earthy body conforms to
his curves and protuberances so that he feels
weightless and unbounded, lost in the uniform
sensation of even pressure exerted by the soil
pressing against his entire body, extinguishing
his golden light. When he finally releases and
stands up, shaken and drunk with the heavy
air perfumed by the smell of her in the rain,
the clumps of earth and gritty pebbles fall
away from him, and the writhing pink worms
try in vain to wriggle back into the suddenly
incoherent soil. 198
Other times, the fertile mud planted with
the cut branch presents him with monstrosities,
fantastic shapes that resemble the human form
only in their general contours and in their drive
to embrace him. The malformed limbs and
orifices frighten and repulse him.
Youre beautiful, he whispers, as though
it were an incantation and accusation.
She says nothing but continues her
incomprehensible susurrations, like a babbling
brook or the chants of incense-addled priests.
Have you learned nothing at all?
This is how books are read. A reading is an
act of erotic violence, an assault upon the text.

She remembers that hectic race through

the woods, the desperate desire to flee, the heart
leaping, wild as the wounded hart.
But he was relentless, irresistible as
his fiery chariots ordained course across the
empyrean. He was a god.
She cried out for help, for succor, for
anything to save her from the burning heat of
this monstrous presence that singed her hair
and scalded her skin. She was willing to give
up everything she had so long as this terror
stopped.
Then she felt nothing at all.

She woke up, blind, deaf, immobile. Her

body did not feel like a body. She was a seed, a
199 capsule of mere potential after everything else
had been taken away.
Desperately, she sent thin tendrils out
into the darkness. She found pockets of warmth
and moisture below, and naturally she focused
all her attention in that direction. But there
was only silence no matter how far she probed.
When she encountered impenetrable walls in
her path, she groped around them and kept
on searching. For days, she extended her body,
ramified it, insinuating herself into the flesh
of the world like rivulets of ice. Finally, she
touched other tendrils like her own. Like a net,
they surrounded her, each bundle issuing forth
from a separate center.
At first she thought she had found others
like herself. Frantically, she tried to reach them,
to speak and be spoken to, but always they
remained silent and dead to her probes.
There were other creatures in the world,
too fast to be clearly discerned by her still
inexperienced vegetal soul. Giant, terrifying
dragons sped through the universe, devouring
the substance of the world at one end and
leaving them behind in a vanishing trail.
Beasts with armored carapaces climbed along
her feelers, navigating the tunnels left by the
dragons as roads. Sometimes she felt pain when
the gods (for so they seemed to her) punished
her by biting and consuming one of her
sensitive tentacles. Humbled, she begged their
forgiveness and tried to grow another to replace
the devoured sacrifice.
Then, one day, she decided to direct her
attention up her dull, unresponsive body instead
of down her sensitive, delicate feelers. When her
mind broke through the surface and emerged 200
from the solidity that she had believed to be
the whole universe, into a country where there
was nothing, no comforting soil, the substance
and essence of the world, she found that she
had been mistaken. At that rarefied height, in
that emptiness that threatened to disintegrate
her body instead of assuring her with a tight
and warm embrace, she felt the ether filled with
something she had forgotten but missed with a
throbbing ache.
She felt light.

I am a god, he thought. What has

happened to me?
But try as he might, he could not ascend
into the heavens in his burning chariot. He
could not forget her, leave her, or even wander
far from the spot where she had vanished.
Though an inner glow still shone from
underneath his skin, he hadas he found out
when he bit into a spiked fruit and felt the salty
blood filling his mouthbecome mortal.
He built a crude shack nearby, imitating
the neighboring peasants whose worship he
had once disdained. He wept with joy and felt
himself glow brighter when he saw a sapling
emerge from her final footprint. She was
alive; she had not been lost; she had merely
metamorphosed.
He learned to scatter the wheat and corn
in the fields. He learned to warm eggs in the
leaf piles and to kill wild rabbits with his hoe.
He was thin but he did not starve, and when
201 winter came he learned how to make fire as
well. In his ennui and solitude, he learned to
think and to perceive at an imperceptible rate,
to sit and let the sun whirl around him while he
caressed the unripe berries with his eyes until
they blushed in his gaze. Then, startled, he
reached out and plucked those berries, his first
meal in who knew how many days.
The tree was fully grown, a dense library
of foliage that beckoned to him, a codex of
judgments that he could not defer.

Sometimes, in the mornings before he is

awake, she tries to listen in on his dreams.
One of her roots extends beneath the
shack. Through the years it has made a little
crack in the floor of the bedroom, where she
can poke up a tender, fine rootlet from time
to time. In the interval before the stale air has
desiccated and suffocated it, she can hear the
noises in the room.
It isn't always easy to distinguish the
noises reverberating through the small room.
A root, after all, isnt an ear. The creaks from
the wooden furniture exhaling the moisture
absorbed through the night seem to her the
loudest; beneath that, the gentle settling of the
house into the straining earth; the light breezes
circling around the room, echoes of the laughter
of her former nymph companions. Only by
the sheerest chance, when all the other noises
suddenly cease for a moment, does she hear him
breathing in the pre-dawn silence, a quivering
note that she does not quite know how to parse.
 # 202

When he slows down his mind, he can

see the tips of her many arms unfolding, tracing
circles and spirals against the clouds racing
overhead. Pressing his fingers to spots where
the bark has been shed and the startlingly white
flesh shows through, he can trace outslowly,
so that his fingers do not glide across but rather
bore into herpatterns over the flow of water
through the xylem and phloem with the heat of
his body.
She writes; he reads. Or is it the other
way around?
Enclosed within her rigid fibrous skin
which nonetheless feels supple and responsive to
her botanical perception, she concentrates upon
the pulsing tips of his fingersso different
from the caress of the sun and the rustling of
the starlings nesting in her arms, recklessly
uplifted into the arid and stifling airpoints of
heat, pinpricks of calefactious light, the stars in
the cool and unchanging dark landscape of her
world.
He writes; she reads. Or is it the other
way around?

The pages you have flipped through

are a failed galaxy where the stars never quite
coalesced out of the exploded and diluted
phrases of other, grander galaxies before it. All
derivative books are like that: echoes of more
august songs of the past, their decline dictated
by the laws of literature as the metamorphoses
203 you and I have undergone were dictated by the
laws of evolution.
But all books are derivative: mirrors
receding into each other down a hall of infinite
regress until they reach the mythical ur-book,
which is also no-book and all-book.
Better, then, not to think of those pages as
anything other than ephemeral shapes presented
to you out of the swirl of ink and toner and
heat and electromagnetism and bits and pixels,
a glimpse of patterns already dissolving into the
perpetual white noise of murmuring syllables in
the room.
The page ahead is flat and empty, as
pristine as the silence in the room before the
first visitor of the day. Down there, I will
sign my namesApollo, Author, Text, Self
weaving them into the air above the page in a
finger tips dance which may meet with your
fingers, your hands, in another time and place.
And I will thank youDaphne, Reader,
Mind, Selfbecause for a moment, if only
for a moment, you have released me into the
world of movements and surfaces, of light and
shadows.

...and when he had spit on his eyes, and

put his hands upon him, he asked him if he
saw ought. And he looked up, and said, I see
men as trees, walking.
Mark 8:2324


2016 1 23 5 3
RAM

RAM

RAM

ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

This publication was realized on the occasion

of the exhibition Heman Chong: Ifs, Ands, or
Buts, curated by Li Qi, at the Rockbund Art
Museum (RAM), Shanghai, January 23May
3, 2016.

RAM expresses its deepest gratitude to

Heman Chong for his passion, diligence, and
commitment in this art project, embracing
the museum with brand-new artworks,
providing insightful perspectives on his
artistic accomplishment in multiple genres.

RAM very warmly thanks the authors Larys

Frogier, Li Qi, Pauline J. Yao, Xiaoyu Weng,
and Ken Liu for their specific contributions to
this publication.


ROCKBUND ART MUSEUM

Director: Larys Frogier Technician: L Xiang

Deputy Director: Liu Yingjiu Administration Manager: Jenny Wu
Senior Curator: Li Qi Administration Specialist: Juno Xie
Exhibition Manager: Hsieh Feng Rong
Curatorial Assistant: Xu Tiantian Interns: Liu Xiyin, Tan Yawen, Wang Yifan,
Chen Yijing, Xiao Zheqian, Gao Kangni,
Education Manager: Yan Chan Liu Chang
Educator: Liu Ying
Dev. & Comm. Manager: Stella Wang
Communication Specialist: Shi Yeting
Designer: Wang Jiayi
Operation Manager: Vivian Li
Operation Specialist: Nova Sun, Amelie
Huang, Bruce Li


11213

btr
13233

2914152263

1013

PUBLICATION

Editor: Li Qi Images on pp. 11213

Designer: Wang Jiayi Photo: Andy Keate
Translator: btr, Daniel Sze Hin Ho, Jing Lei,
Zhu Jing Images on pp. 13233
Proofreading: Daniel Sze Hin Ho, Fu Chunyin Photo: Sang-tae Kim
Printing: Artron Art (Group) Co. Ltd.,
Shanghai

Images on pp. 29, 1415 , 2263

Photo: Yan Tao

Images on pp. 1013

Photo: Allen Cui
 ISBN 978-3-95679-321-9

20
200002
www.rockbundartmuseum.org

2017

78
D-10243
www.sternberg-press.com

Published by Rockbund Art Museum (RAM) ISBN 978-3-95679-321-9

and Sternberg Press
All rights reserved. No part of this publication
Rockbund Art Museum may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval
20 Huqiu Road system, or transmitted in any form or by any
Huangpu District means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying,
Shanghai, China 200002 recording or otherwise, without prior
www.rockbundartmuseum.org permission in writing from the publisher.

Sternberg Press All works the artist

Caroline Schneider
Karl-Marx-Allee 78 2017 the artist, the authors, Rockbund Art
D-10243 Berlin Museum (RAM), and Sternberg Press
www.sternberg-press.com