10.6092/issn.2038-3460/16313
application/pdf
2038-3460
16313
2
en
Heman Chong
https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-sa/2.5/
Tecnoscienza – Italian Journal of Science & Technology Studies
God Bless Diana (Cover's Comment)
Text.Serial.Journal
https://tecnoscienza.unibo.it/
1
Editorial
2011-01-07
2023-01-23
2011-01-07
2023-06-29
TS
Heman Chong
2010
10.6092/issn.2038-3460/16313
2038-3460
2
en
God Bless Diana (Cover's Comment)
https://tecnoscienza.unibo.it/article/download/16313/15460
1
                                   copertina / cover
A photo from the work God Bless Diana (2000-2004) by Heman Chong.

Heman Chong’s project God Bless Diana (2000-2004) encapsulates the working
methods and world-view of an artist constantly on the move. Having based
himself in Europe for the past five years, Chong embraces the fragmented yet
expansive nature of contemporary mobility, using as his raw materials the
everyday objects, moments and slippages that construct a sense of place and
identity. His videos, photographs and installations consistently frame his own
experience within a broader notion of community, questioning the ways in which
subjectivities are formed in a shifting global environment.
God Bless Diana takes the conceptual form of an archive, based on a series of
550 photographs selected from a pool of over 6,000. Printed as postcards and
sold from an elegantly designed ‘postcard boutique’, the images are then able to
be redistributed into the world. Each postcard is considered an artwork in its
own right, able to function individually as well as collectively, with its
accessibility, affordability and functionality resisting the exclusiveness of the art
world. Yet Chong’s boutique is more than a dispassionate analysis or critique of
the commercial circulation of images. By connecting his own experiences and
aesthetic choices to those who purchase his cards and then receive them in the
mail, Chong creates a complex web of human relationships, linking imagination
and reality, the individual and society.
Despite its sense of vastness and multiplicity, God Bless Diana displays Chong’s
interest in structures and systems. Ordered into categories, the images are a
taxonomy of urban life from Singapore to London to Beijing to New York:
signage, foliage, rubble, graffiti. Numerous motifs recur throughout, including
grids, crosses and coils, betraying a sculptural sensibility that is echoed in the
clean cube of the boutique. While seemingly random, the photographs are all
carefully composed, obeying the formal requirements of shape, space and
composition. The urban landscape becomes an open field of potential
readymades, waiting to be framed and refigured by the lens of the artist’s camera.
Chong is intrigued by what he calls the ‘life and times of objects’, and the
narratives that these involve extend from the economic processes of production
and exchange into the personalised nature of everyday consumption. The display
of objects as an index of identity has been a feature of a number of the artist’s
works, from the table piled with food, cigarettes and office furniture in Divided
Tonight (with Corinna Kniffki, 2004) to the stacks of glasses, books and chairs in
The Silver Sessions (2003). Always rigorously arranged, the objects take on an
allegorical dimension that the artist calls ‘cinematic’, forming a productive
tension between the real and the world of imagination and play. This element is
generously extended in God Bless Diana, with its implication of the world as the
artist’s studio, and his audience as fellow travellers.

                                                           Text by Russell Storer


(First published in Contemporary Art in Singapore, ICA, Singapore, 2007).
