Murmurmurmurmurmur (VeneziaAccademiaRemix), Heman Chong’s work for the Singapore Pavilion at the 50th Venice Biennale, reveals the author as someone who is developing a language of pluralism, rather than following a strict obedience to a specific medium.

Alongside 20 monitors, the room features a light installation comprised of 38 pink fluorescents, an aural sample of language courses, a reading of a fiction in the next room with windows laced with a red gel – a composite of these evokes a landscape of differences created from Chong’s meticulous feel for layers. Layers upon layers of meanings waiting to be condensed in one’s mind; similar to the experience of a walk through a dense urban jungle – perhaps suggesting the vernacular of the artist’s habitat or his mindscape.

Often describing himself as a hopeless consumer, Chong has managed to create peculiar meanings with his self-assumptions. He collects things and slowly positions them, juxtaposes them in a manner similar to a social scientist. To follow the growth of his archives would be to trace an urbanite’s rampant global path, amassing ideas, objects and situations – creating a map of the contemporary world and the individual trajectories within it.

Dean Summers