With over 50 works and six new commissions, Singapore Art Museum presents the first major survey by Heman Chong that is a recalibration of art, memory, and meaning in our endlessly networked world
The exhibition title, This is a dynamic list and may never be able to satisfy particular standards for completeness, is truly a mouthful. You could mistake it as a glitch, or an unfinished thought, or the world’s most self-aware asterisk, and you’d be right on all counts. Borrowed from Wikipedia’s disclaimer language, the title is also a conceptual entry point into Singaporean artist Heman Chong’s sprawling, deeply considered survey at the Singapore Art Museum (SAM), which runs from 10 May to 17 August 2025. This is a show that will invite, provoke, and occasionally resist interpretation.
Comprising 51 works spanning two decades, including six newly commissioned pieces, the exhibition functions as a living, layered archive of Chong’s conceptual practice, which unfolds across nine keyword-themed rooms: Words, Whispers, Ghosts, Journeys, Futures, Findings, Infrastructures, Surfaces, and Endings. Much like a search engine with its own emotional logic, each section delves into the meaning of meaning itself in this hyper-mediated world of ours.
If you’re unfamiliar with works by Heman Chong, you can expect wit and rigour in equal measure. In Perimeter Walk, Chong photographs the entire circumference by foot, capturing the quiet chaos of the island’s literal and metaphorical edges. These images are transformed into postcards which visitors can take home, extending the work’s circulation far beyond the white cube that is SAM. Developed with Renee Staal, The Library of Unread Books repositions unread books as cultural artefacts of good intentions and unread possibilities. Calendars (2020-2096) presents 1,001 images of empty Singaporean public spaces, arranged into a fictional chronology of decades, inviting visitors on a reflective journey on memory, time, and the void.
Elsewhere, visitors can experience spy novels shredded into cryptic fragments in Secrets and Lies, name cards blacked out and walked over in Monument to the people we’ve conveniently forgotten, and a national flag rendered entirely in red text in The Singapore Flag. And even Chong’s own deleted novel gets a posthumous presence as recovered fragments of Prospectus, printed across the gallery wall like a glitchy epitaph.
While much of his work veers cerebral, it never forgets its humanity. In 106B Depot Road Singapore 102106, Heman Chong reconstructs the contours of his HDB flat from memory, enlisting an architect to bring it to life through speech alone; a poignant gesture towards how homes, like history, are made as much by feeling as by form.
If there’s a single takeaway for us from This is a dynamic list and may never be able to satisfy particular standards for completeness, it’s that knowing really isn’t always the point. Navigating, questioning, and perhaps most importantly, being present in the process—that’s where art happens.
