Heman Chong's artistic practice navigates the intricacies of sociopolitical themes by channeling the power of storytelling and everyday objects. He often employs strategies such as staging situations, engaging in acts of writing, participation, and collaboration in his works across different mediums, including visual art, performance, and installation. In The Endless Summer, Chong's upcoming solo exhibition at UCCA Dune, Chong will transport the viewers to a surreal world on the wintery beach in Northern China, unfolding a story about everyday life in the tropics. The exhibition dwells on this single season, expanding in all directions about heat, humidity, sweat, and the sun. The cavernous spaces of UCCA Dune will play host to a bookshop, a million name cards, 500 postcards, numerous wind chimes and other ideas, objects and situations that point to an imaginary journey around a tiny tropical island. The works in this exhibition will think about collectivity and circulation. It is a story of images, texts, and objects being moved from one place to another. Within the exhibition, everything is in flux. Multiple versions of the exhibition are produced by shifting the objects around constantly via performative gestures that involve the displacement and relocation of these things that are being presented to the audience. This exhibition is curated by UCCA curator Luan Shixuan.
'All the works I make revolve around the writing of fiction,' said artist, writer, and curator Heman Chong in a 2017 video for Swiss Institute. Spanning installation, painting, performance, photography, and writing, Chong's practice is largely concerned with interrogating the everyday mediums of politics through language, seriality, infrastructure and exchanges of information.
UCCA Center for Contemporary Art is China’s leading contemporary art institution. Committed to the belief that art can deepen lives and transcend boundaries, UCCA presents a wide range of exhibitions, public programs, and research initiatives to a public of more than one million visitors each year. UCCA Beijing sits at the heart of the 798 Art District, occupying 10,000 square meters of factory chambers built in 1957 and regenerated in 2019 by OMA. UCCA Dune, designed by Open Architecture, lies beneath the sand in the seaside enclave of Aranya in Beidaihe.
