Watching deleted scenes

Heman Chong is inspired by Arkady & Boris Strugatsky, Stanislaw Lem, J.G. Ballard, Philip K. Dick, Michel Houellebecq, Thomas More, Haruki Murakami and countless other science fiction writers. His art practice involves an investigation into the philosophies, reasons and methods of individuals and communities imagining the future. Charged with a conceptual drive, this research is then adapted into objects, images, installations, situations or texts. The artist represented Singapore at the 50th Venice Biennale in 2003. He has collectively written a science fiction novel entitled PHILIP with seven other collaborators, published by Project Press in 2006. Heman Chong works with Vitamin Creative Space (Beijing/Guangzhou).

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When I began the series of collages, Deleted Scenes, I had in mind a process that reflected something completely violent on a seriously extensive level. I have been researching, for two years now, this topic of the representation of imposed solitude, where an individual is deliberately taken out of society, and a huge portion of it deals with the idea of being imprisoned by an authoritarian body. This has been a thorn in my side for a long time, as we are surrounded by many reports, especially in Southeast Asia, where we know for a fact that people are being put away for their political beliefs.

Please don’t get the wrong impression that I am some sort of a political crusader, making art as political statements. On the contrary, I am an escapist. I have never involved myself directly in any form of protest, neither am I part of any political party or NGO. I stand alone. As an artist. And my work is political (I believe that all work is political, whether you label it that or not). 

My position as an artist is informed by the fact that I am neither the beginning nor the end of anything. I find it really difficult to accept art that speaks of itself as new or innovative. For me, it’s such an impossibility — to state that it came from nowhere, plucked out of the clouds. I reject this notion. 

This position of an escapist interests me much more than being active in politics. I have always been drawn to characters in narrative who exist outside of the active arena of a situation rather than the main heroes. People who have no strings attached to anything, who are capable of saying anything they like and want without having to justify themselves to any side or form or shape. Loose cannons, we call them. 

To make the work, I begin by taking photographs with my camera phone. As I have my phone with me at all times, these photographs are of anything and everything. There is no selection process involved when selecting what to capture. Buildings, plants, people having sex in clubs, people crossing a street, people eating in a cafe. Mostly I make the photos while spending time with my wife, hanging around, doing nothing on a warm tropical afternoon. 

Then these photographs are sent to the cheapest photo lab in Singapore to be processed. It is really important that they are produced in a shop where other images from the general public are being processed. It means that the photograph in this instance has the same status as an ordinary snapshot by the man on the street, without any kind of artistic consciousness to it. Just memories. Nothing else. Nothing elite or highbrow about it. 

The photographs are ready. They’re 4 by 6 inches each, what we call 4R size. The most common size for snaps. I usually print up to about 100 to 200 prints at one time. I bring them home. I take a penknife and cut a rectangle out of the center of the photograph, leaving a one-centimeter border all around. 

What remains is a curious little object, resembling a frame without a picture but which is a picture in itself. You immediately develop this sense of loss when you look at the sad bastard. 

I remember years ago, when Singapore was still pretty anal about censoring pictures of naked bodies in magazines, I would find missing pages in magazines (mostly from European magazines like Dazed & Confused and The Face) you find off the shelves and wonder what these images are. It represents a lost idea, floating around, being horribly de-contextualized from its mothership. 

I digress. This project is NOT about censorship. 

Imagine being imprisoned. For a long, long time. So long that you don’t even remember the face of your mother. That is what this work is about. The fragility of images. You try every morning to remember the outline of her face, the shape of her nose, the softness of her lips. But you get nothing out of this except for something that resembles a Josef Albers painting. 

Now that is violent. 

I haven’t made a photograph in years. I just can’t. I can’t bring myself to bring into this world another image when we’re already surrounded by so many. And so many that are so senseless. Even the important ones. 

We are confronted every day with a massive amount of images through the Internet. Google something and you can instantaneously get an image of it. We view our friend’s lives through their snaps on Facebook. We are bombarded with visions of the past, the present and the future, all on that 12-inch laptop. It de-sensitizes us to the power of images: as rare, objectified reflections of the human condition. What we have today is just fluff, lint from the neither world of endless snapshots of banal minutes we spend drinking coffee at Starbucks. 

So this is the result of my problematic relationship with photography. To make them and to immediately erase them. And to forget. Just like the man in the cell, waiting indefinitely for the day he sees the sky again, to experience rain on his face.