Heman Chong: The Endless Summer

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. It 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 this way, the exhibition invites visitors to explore the intersections of memory, fantasy, and perception. It prompts reflection on material and economic foundations via deftly constructed storytelling woven with nostalgia. 

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 dialogue. His artistic language transcends a singular medium to navigate painting, installation, performance, and literature, placing them in 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. Chong frequently employs 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 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.

Themes of memory, reality, perception, and social complexities are explored throughout installations including 106B Depot Road, a reconstructed minimalist model of the artist’s former studio and residential building; Tanglin Halt Green (A Survey), a video capturing ruins after the demolition of Singapore’s largest public housing estate; Prospectus, fragmented text weaving a scattered narrative in a testament as well as commemoration to a deleted novel. Other works, like Paperwork and Monument to the people we’ve conveniently forgotten (I hate you), address identity and its layered intricacies in contemporary society with A4 paper and namecards as motifs. In a contemplative study of blurring the physical and metaphorical concept of boundaries, Perimeter Walk unfolds across UCCA Dune’s largest gallery space in a series of photographic postcards. Travel and migration are then explored via The Library of Endless Journeys, a collection of books reflecting on the movement of people and their memories, or stories. Immersive installation Constructions and outdoor sculpture A Different Kind of Loneliness continue to blur boundaries and the nuances of identity. Through these intertwined experiences, Chong challenges ideas and perceptions of personal and public narratives with a nuanced exploration of inhabiting, as well as shaping, the spaces around us and our memories of them against contemporary societal complexities.

Heman Chong: The Endless Summer is curated by UCCA Curator Luan Shixuan. Exclusive wall solutions support is provided by Dulux, and exclusive audio equipment and technical support provided by Genelec. UCCA thanks the members of UCCA Foundation Council, International Circle, and Young Associates, as well as Lead Partner Aranya, Lead Art Book Partner DIOR, Lead Imaging Partner vivo, Presenting Partner Bloomberg, and Supporting Partners AIA, Barco, Dulux, Genelec, SKP Beijing, and Stey. Special thanks to the M Art Foundation for the support in the development of Perimeter Walk, with acknowledgement to its founders Wu Meng and Michael Li, both longstanding members of the UCCA Foundation Council.