Singapore Art Museum (SAM) presents the first major survey exhibition of mid-career Singapore artist Heman Chong, titled This is a dynamic list and may never be able to satisfy particular standards for completeness. From 10 May to 17 August 2025, explore 51 works from the early 2000s to the present, including six new commissions unveiled at the exhibition. The exhibition maps Chong’s prolific conceptual practice while inviting fresh perspectives on its meaning and relevance today. Transforming the anxieties and absurdities of our information-saturated lives into witty visual, textural, and material experiences, the exhibition sounds an evocative call to make sense of our everyday realities and the value of art in a digital age.

A key figure in Singapore’s art history, Chong epitomises a generation of regional artists who found international acclaim as contemporary artists at the turn of the century and the dawn of our hyper-networked digital age. His multifaceted artistic practice defies easy categorisation and fluidly moves between photography, installation, performance, and painting. At the core of Chong’s dynamic practice is an interest in dissecting the infrastructures that underpin our complex realities, which he teases by engaging with and aggregating information from the mundane experiences of daily contemporary life. This unique balance of conceptual rigour and relatable explorations has propelled Chong’s reputation in the global art world.

The exhibition’s title signals its intent, existing as both an artwork in the exhibition and a deliberate appropriation of Wikipedia’s terms and conditions for the ever-changing nature of its online lists. Rather than attempting a definitive, exhaustive survey of Chong’s extensive career, the exhibition reconsiders Chong’s canonical works within the context of our hyper-mediated present. Self-referential in more ways than one, it points to a key strategy in Chong’s practice to question the viability of appropriation in a time where information is constantly rewritten and adopting new meanings. The exhibition, developed by the artist, unfolds across nine thematic rooms, each organised around keywords: Words, Whispers, Ghosts, Journeys, Futures, Findings, Infrastructures, Surfaces, and Endings. Through these rooms, viewers are invited into Chong’s critical and affective interrogation of objects, situations, logics, and affinities, which express the human condition in the 21st century.

On Chong’s practice, Kathleen Ditzig, co-curator of the exhibition and Curator at National Gallery Singapore, says, “A critical characteristic of Heman Chong’s conceptualism is its multifaceted and organically reconstituting process of relations as it adapts to forms of organisation, governance and networks—a logic that is definitive of Singapore Contemporary Art.”

The exhibition survey unveils a series of six newly commissioned works, offering an insightful exploration of Chong’s evolving artistic practice. Among them is Wanderlust / Rebecca Solnit (2025), the latest addition to his Cover (Versions) series, where Chong paints book covers for books he has not yet read but intends to. He uses exaggerated brushstrokes and abstracted masses of colour to transform each book’s essence into a visual experience. Building on this exploration of abstraction, Labyrinths (Libraries) #29 (2025) delves into the logic of grids and the complex order found in libraries. These paintings’ interplay of positive and negative space reflects shifting perspectives, evoking the dynamic relationship between time, ideas, and knowledge within a library’s vast collection.

In Modernity and Beyond (2020), as part of his Ambient Walking YouTube channel, he documents SAM’s former premises, reflecting upon the building’s history as emblematic of the ongoing transformation of artistic and cultural infrastructure in Singapore. Expanding into broader historical observation, The Book of Equators #1 (2024) interrogates imperial histories in its intervention on everyday polyester fabrics purchased in a local shop in Singapore. By imposing lines of latitudes over mass-produced tropical patterns, Chong critiques the legacy of colonial imposition and its entanglement with contemporary consumer culture in the tropics.

Internationally acclaimed and circulated, Chong’s art nevertheless possesses a distinctive Singaporean sensibility. Deeply rooted in his Singapore experience, Chong peels back the city’s polished veneer to reveal its many layers, where personal memory and collective experience converge. As he reflects, “These past two years I’ve been working with SAM had led me to really reflect on my process and the different streams in which I work, where I have become more aware of how a lot of it is essentially my reaction to the everyday in Singapore. We live in a city where we are often being told what we can do or cannot do, so in my work I want to avoid having this paternalistic, disapproving Asian father figure voice. I want you to decide how you want to interpret and interact with the art, and I think we can create a world within an exhibition that moves away from this way of communicating with each other.”

This intent is perhaps most evident in participatory works like Calendars (2020 – 2096) (2004-2010), where viewers encounter 1,001 images depicting paradoxically emptied public-accessible spaces around Singapore that Chong photographed over seven years. Presented as calendar pages set in a fictional future, Chong speculatively challenges conventional notions of time, inviting the viewer to imagine meaning in the memories of a future yet to come. Chong’s expansive installation, Perimeter Walk (2013-2024), adopts a similar documentary style. Comprising 550 postcards of images taken as the artist traversed the borders of Singapore on foot, the work renounces a singular view of the city, weaving together a multifaceted narrative of life at its fringes. Functioning as a pop-up store where visitors can purchase the postcards, the exhibition facilitates the exchange and circulation of these images, extending their visual narratives beyond the gallery’s walls.his ongoing postcard-based projects, where audience agency plays a central role.

As Chong explains, “Postcards is also an important work for me. You have to choose which postcards you want, and I would not try to tell a story with it—it’s a lot about you choosing the ten postcards that tell yourself that story. It’s important for me that people are given that possibility to say something for themselves, rather than entering a space again, where their identity and behaviours are fixed by the system.”

With 106B Depot Road Singapore 102106 (2024), in collaboration with Jiehao Lau, Chong reconstructs the contours of his residential building that is distinctive as archetypal public housing design in Singapore seen as synonymous with the city-state’s modernity; however, in its production through speech and memory rather than plans, the work lends a human touch to this pragmatic efficiency.

Beyond Singapore, the exhibition confronts the pervasive systems and structures of power that govern our lives. Foreign Affairs #106 (2018/2025) features photographs of embassy backdoors, which Chong uses as recurring motifs. This systematic approach evokes both the cinematic frame and the omnipresence of the surveillance camera that watches nothing and everything. In a similar visual strategy, The Straits Times, Friday, September 27, 2013, Cover (2018), part of his series Abstracts From The Straits Times, uses repetition and overlap to “submerge” and “black out” journalistic headlines and photos from Singapore’s primary daily newspaper. This process mirrors the glitch introduced during the work’s creation, urging viewers to recognise hidden biases in editorial decisions and promoting critical consumption in today’s mediated landscape.

A trained graphic designer, Chong also scrutinises how form shapes perception. He recalls his early resistance to the A4 format, noting, “One thing graphic designers hate most is to use A4. I hate this standard size, it’s so generic, like eating McDonald’s. One of the first questions going through my head was ‘who created the A4 design, how did it become the standard, and how do I feel about this standardisation?” Such questions—posed without insisting on fixed answers—permeate his practice. “I find that in a lot of my shows and works, it’s important that people make up their own minds. I think I’m OK with more oblique ways of thinking about the world, and perhaps it is within that possibility of exhibition and encountering that artwork that we have a chance to move away from these very fixed relationships with each other and the world at large.”

The exhibition also showcases Chong’s exploration of meaning through form with Secrets and Lies (The Impossibility of Reconstitutions) (2012) that features 326 spy and espionage novels shredded and thus transformed into out-of-context and incomplete statements and quotes. The irreversible act, reducing these narratives into the parts that once made them whole, results in an ironic “encryption” of their content. Similarly, Works on Paper #2: Prospectus (2006/2024) presents fragments of a forever-lost novel, now comprising only 239 legible words that were salvaged after a hasty deletion. With the text’s original meaning only known to Chong, these traces perform a new function and serve as a textual and physical monument to this loss.

In The Singapore Flag (2015), Chong reimagines the iconic national symbol. Like other national flags, the Singapore flag represents the nation’s ideals, beliefs, and values. However, this artwork presents the flag as text, with an official description rendered in the same red hue as the state flag itself. This approach invites the viewer to imagine the flag rather than simply observe it.

Materiality is further explored in Monument to the people we’ve conveniently forgotten (I hate you) (2008), which features a tactile sea of blacked-out name cards on which visitors are invited to walk upon. The accumulation of these blacked-out cards parodies the performance and perfunctory nature of its social exchange, disorienting visitors physically and prompting a reflection on human connections. With his series Stacks (2003-ongoing), Chong presents annual sculptural works, each conceived over the period of a year, thus reflecting the passage of time and the rhythm of this chronological threshold. Comprising books and glasses Chong read and used in the preceding year—familiar, everyday objects imbued with personal significance, each “stack” serves as both a punctuation and a record of time passed.

Finally, the exhibition presents Chong’s performances that revolve around the experience and circulation of texts. One of Chong’s most iconic works, The Library of Unread Books (2016-ongoing), developed with Renée Staal, is an itinerant reference library of unread books donated by the public, simultaneously addressing the distribution, access, and surplus of knowledge. Two time-based performances are presented on Saturdays during the exhibition’s run: Everything (Wikipedia) (2016) and A Short Story About Geometry (2009). A Short Story About Geometry, from the series Memories, invites public participation and is encountered only in the transmission of its story between an instructor and a participant. The artist has promised to never publish the short story in print or on digital platforms — the contents of Chong’s narrative are received in the form of memorisation and retelling, requiring an exchange of time and effort to experience the work.

A publication titled after the exhibition will be available from May 2025. It provides a companion index of Chong’s concept-based artworks alongside essays that survey Chong’s engagement with conceptualism over the 2000s, a period defined by the rise of social media and the Singapore state’s investment in contemporary art.

In addition, SAM will host two special in-depth talks on Chong’s practice, featuring Dr. Bill Sherman (from The Warburg Institute with his pioneering work on marginalia and the history of libraries) and Pauline J. Yao (Hong Kong-based independent curator and writer, previously Lead Curator (Visual Art) at M+ and with a long-standing familiarity with the artist’s practice) on 14 June 2025 and 21 June 2025 respectively. Visitors can also participate in a dynamic range of programmes throughout the exhibition period, such as guided exhibition tours, film screenings, and drop-in activities.

June Yap, Director of Curatorial and Research at SAM and co-curator of the exhibition, says, “Heman Chong’s relationship with SAM is remarkably long-standing, having been featured in early regional exhibitions by the museum such as City/Community – Nokia Singapore Art (1999), the Singapore Biennale, to recent commissions in 2020 and the present extensive survey in 2025. As such, this exhibition is as much a representation of his prolific body of work over time as it is a charting of the museum and Singapore’s contemporary artistic developments. We look forward to sharing Chong’s witty practice and serious humour with our audiences, and igniting meaningful conversations about art and how we live in this digital age.”

This is a dynamic list and may never be able to satisfy particular standards for completeness. runs from 10th May to 17th August 2025 at SAM at Tanjong Pagar Distripark. More information available here