From October 27, 2024, to April 6, 2025, UCCA Dune presents “Heman Chong: The Endless Summer,” the second institutional solo of Singaporean contemporary artist Heman Chong (b. 1977, Malaysia, lives and works in Singapore) in China. This exhibition features a dynamic selection of the artist’s representative works across installations, videos, and painting, including seven commissioned by UCCA. Through a series of multimedia works and immersive environments, “Heman Chong: The Endless Summer” transports visitors to an everlasting summer in an illusory tropical narrative along a coast in Northern China. The interactive experience of the exhibition includes participatory elements such as purchasing postcards, reading in a miniature library, or sitting outside on a bench overlooking the sea. Each interaction encourages deeper reflection on the transmission of experience and the exchange of knowledge. In doing so, this exhibition invites visitors to explore the intersections of memory, fantasy, and perception, prompting reflection on material and economic foundations via deftly constructed storytelling woven with nostalgia. “Heman Chong: The Endless Summer” is curated by UCCA Curator Luan Shixuan.
One of Singapore’s leading contemporary artists, Heman Chong embodies multiple identities – artist, curator, writer, and digital content creator – that infuse revitalized energy and perspectives into global art dialogue. His artistic language transcends a singular medium to fluidly navigate painting, installation, performance, and literature into intricate, interconnected networks. Chong often uses the term “post-studio” to describe his core methodology, in which he incorporates everyday behaviors such as walking, reading, and writing into his creative process with clever sematic shifts and contextualization to reveal deeper social constructs hidden in the familiarity of daily routine. Additionally, the artist is skillful at employing repetition, stacking, and other strategies to impart spatial dimension and sculptural qualities to flat objects and words. In his multimedia exhibitions, Chong’s works function as both static, visual presentations as well as dynamic, participatory artistic experiences in a vibrantly creative, imagined journey.
For this exhibition at UCCA Dune, the presentation of the tropics along a wintry northern coastline is a purposeful gesture of tension and paradox. The juxtaposition of a northern winter with tropical imagery and the stark contrast in the exhibition location and its thematic content is an invitation to ponder the boundaries between established realities and imagined spaces. The exhibition title itself is a description of tropical seasons as well as an allusion to a shared experience that transcends geographical boundaries. This prompts the questioning of authenticity and sustainability, which runs through the exhibition as a thematic undercurrent. There are no chapters in this exhibition; instead, all works resonate and connect with one another in a fluid narrative. Utilizing both indoor and outdoor areas of the museum, Chong constructs an imaginative and surreal exploration of senses and perception.
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In another contemplative interplay of presence, identity, and space, the outdoor sculpture A Different Kind of Loneliness, featuring a circular bench made of recycled wood, makes anyone who sits on it a part of the artwork. Through these intertwined experiences, “Heman Chong: The Endless Summer” prompts reflection on the complex interconnection of personal and public narratives with a nuanced exploration of inhabiting, as well as shaping, the spaces around us and our memories of them.
Heman Chong: The Endless Summer
Oct 27, 2024 – Apr 6, 2025
UCCA UCCA Center for Contemporary Art, Dune
Beidaihe, China
