Heman Chong at SAM: Monuments to memory and forgetting
[SINGAPORE] Heman Chong, Singapore's quintessential conceptual artist, finally gets the career look-back he deserves at the Singapore Art Museum (SAM). But instead of mounting a typical retrospective, he has given us a characteristically strange and open-ended interrogation into what we choose to remember, what we choose to forget, and the absurdities of living in a hyper-networked world that remembers everything and nothing at once.
The show carries a long and unwieldy title taken off a Wikipedia disclaimer: This is a dynamic list and may never be able to satisfy particular standards for completeness. For Chong, incompleteness is not a failure but a principle to celebrate.
His work thrives in grey zones: the unread book, the closed door, the footnote that never gets read. His installations sprawl across nine thematically curated rooms – Words, Whispers, Ghosts, Journeys, Futures, Findings, Infrastructures, Surfaces and Endings – and each one feels like you have stumbled into the dumping ground of the information age.
Heman Chong's Monument to the people we've conveniently forgotten (I hate you) (2008) is a sea of one million blacked-out business cards. PHOTO: SINGAPORE ART MUSEUM / HEMAN CHONG
Take Monument to the people we've conveniently forgotten (I hate you) (2008), for instance. It comprises one million – yes, one million – blacked-out business cards strewn across the floor. You can walk over them, lie on top of them, bathe in them, if you like – but you will never know who these business cards belonged to. It is a sea of forgotten names and unrealised connections turned into a playground of amnesia.
If memory is a battleground, then The Library of Unread Books (2016-ongoing) is its cemetery. It is made up of hundreds of books donated by the public – books that were bought but never read by their owners. Together, they make up a collective confession of good intentions not followed through. It is less a library and more a mausoleum of curiosity, celebrating the gulf between acquiring knowledge and actually engaging with it.
The Library Of Unread Books by Heman Chong and Renee Staal is made up of hundreds of books purchased by hundreds of people but never read. PHOTO: SINGAPORE ART MUSEUM / HEMAN CHONG
And then there is Calendars (2020-2096) (2004-2010), where Chong presents 1,001 calendar pages featuring images of emptied public spaces in Singapore. The dates extend decades into the future, flirting with the absurdity of planning for a tomorrow that may never come. Though created before the pandemic, its depictions of vacant spaces eerily foreshadow the emptiness of Covid-19 lockdowns.
There are several new commissions. Among them is Wanderlust / Rebecca Solnit (2025), an exceptionally beautiful addition to his Cover (Versions) series, where Chong re-imagines book covers for titles he has not yet read but intends to. Other works such as Emails From Strangers (kami coar) (2025) and Oleanders (2023-ongoing) similarly celebrate the forgotten, the unread, the unspoken.
A spam e-mail from a stranger is memorialised in Heman Chong's work Emails From Strangers (kami coar) (2025) . PHOTO: SINGAPORE ART MUSEUM / HEMAN CHONG
Curation by June Yap and Kathleen Ditzig is masterful, shaping a space that is both clinically sterile and invitingly immersive. The show simultaneously asks you to step in and stay away, look closer and look away, question everything you think you know – or ignore everything you see. Somewhere in Singapore, Chong – archivist, agitator, provocateur, prankster – is having a laugh.
The exhibition runs at the Singapore Art Museum until Aug 17
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