Heman Chong
Meditations on Shadow Libraries
STPI, Singapore

Over the past two decades, Heman Chong has harbored a deep fascination with knowledge circulation through his multifaceted, conceptually driven practice. “Meditations on Shadow Libraries” at STPI gallery represented the Malaysian-born, Singapore-based artist’s steadfast exploration through nine diverse works, with mediums spanning installation, painting, and video. Within the exhibition, a “shadow library”—online databases that facilitate open access to commercialized or copyrighted material—served as a conceptual anchor for alternative, unpredictable, and idiosyncratic approaches to knowledge dissemination and collection building.

Books, libraries, textual materials, and the artistic act of collecting were a palpable presence throughout the exhibition. Fittingly, the first work that greeted visitors was The Library of Unread Books (2016– ), a collaborative endeavor with Singapore-based collection manager Renée Staal. As its title implies, it features donated works that were unread by their former owners. Unlike in traditional libraries, however, the peripatetic books amassed by Chong and Staal frequently journey to international institutions and are not systematically organized. Instead, texts are casually arranged on folding tables, a haphazard method that subverts libraries’ conventional institutionalism. At the heart of the installation thus lies the creative endeavour of philanthropic collecting, of providing free access to these unread books, transforming once-private possessions into a public, communal resource for engagement.