Catch Meditations On Shadow Libraries from 17 January to 10 March 2024

Kicking off the 2024 Singapore Art Week by leading Singapore-based artist Heman Chong, STPI, Creative Workshop & Gallery presents Meditations on Shadow Libraries. This multi-disciplinary exhibition runs from 17 January to 10 March 2024 and is curated by Brian Kuan Wood.

Duality In Art

Publishing is full of contradictions between actual people and the endless possibilities of knowledge. Heman Chong’s solo exhibition at STPI gathers 9 bodies of work that form a new palimpsest of his multi-faceted practice, with its idiosyncratic movements in, around and between the production of images, performances, situations and writings.

Over the last two decades, Chong has been preoccupied with the public library as ideology, material and site, and Meditations on Shadow Libraries explores the unexpected shapes and forms of today’s personal, individual or informal libraries given the way we rapidly share information and knowledge.

Heman Chong

A Free World

How can we begin to think beyond a mere capitalisation of data? Should everyone be allowed to share information freely and without consequence? What would that system look and feel like? What are the limits of control when the ease of sharing knowledge becomes increasingly commonplace?

As an exhibition, Meditations on Shadow Libraries is both like a giant single piece of artwork and a set of open-ended individual works through which multiple objects, experiences and ideas might pass. With lightness and humour.

Art Worth Talking About

On top of that, how are books and people always a new encounter with a shared enterprise, full of holes and unexplored domains? Since 1999, the work of Heman Chong has been the subject of solo exhibitions at art galleries and institutions around the world. This is also his second solo exhibition at STPI.

During Singapore Art Week, STPI will also present artworks by Heman Chong at the gallery’s booth (BB14) at ART SG, the leading international art fair in Singapore and Southeast Asia, held at the Marina Bay Sands Expo & Convention Centre from 19 January to 21 January 2024.

More information can be found on the Official STPI Website.