The Reading Room, Bangkok

9th July 2013

7 September 2013–7 September 2014

Opening and book launch: Saturday 7 September, 7pm till late'

The Reading Room, Bangkok.
4th floor, 2 Silom Soi 19,
Bangkok 10500, Thailand
Hours: Wednesday–Sunday 1–7pm
www.readingroombkk.org

For 52 Saturdays in an entire year between 7 September 2013 to 7 September 2014, you are invited to come to The Reading Room to participate in a work by Heman Chong titled A Short Story About Saturdays.

This work entails you investing time in memorizing (in Thai or English) a 500-word short story that Chong has written. The performance will only end when you can manage to retell the story word for word back to the instructor.

Pauline J Yao and Amanda Lee Koe write of this project: "The work posits a unique form of conversing, romantic in its transience and traumatic in its exactness. The exchange is based on factors of time and mental energy. In return for his or her time (the process can take up to three hours), the participant 'receives' a gift; in this case, a memorized short story. It is a transaction where conventional definitions of receipt and value are challenged, and where the process of memorization creates an intimate bond between 'teacher' and 'student,' as both are united in reaching the goal of committing the story to memory.... Expending one's time in exchange for an artwork—or in this case, a narrative interlude—is an attractive feature for Chong, insofar as it offers a chance to reexamine and recalibrate the ways in which economies of art are commonly based on production and profit, and to move toward a model that embraces the intangible space of interhuman connections."

You can contact us by email at kyo[AT]readingroombkk.org to reserve a slot on any Saturday. Slots are available on a first-come, first-served basis. There are three slots every Saturday. Sign up early to avoid disappointment.

In tandem with A Short Story About Saturdays, Chong will also stage a performance involving the live translation of an entire novel from Thai to English over 7–8 September, titled Simultaneous.

The Part In The Story Where We Lost Count Of The Days is a series of three exhibitions developed by Heman Chong that will occur over three spaces and cities—Rossi & Rossi in Hong Kong, Future Perfect in Singapore and The Reading Room in Bangkok. This series of exhibitions looks at his practice as both maker of objects and facilitator of situations, focussing on his ideas and processes that sit at the intersection of multiple genres: visual art, performance, writing, installation and science fiction. This installment in The Reading Room is curated by Tang Fu Kuen.

A newly published monograph (with the same title as the exhibitions) will be launched at each of the exhibition openings. Through commissioned texts and explanations of selected projects produced between 2003 and 2012, the publication seeks to engage and unravel themes of fiction, futurism, language, representation, performance and circulation, via formulations of contemporary discourse that highlight their overlapping and circuitous nature. Such an approach is designed to situate Chong’s practice within and across an array of disciplines, rather than evaluate his work in qualitative terms. Published by ArtAsiaPacific magazine and edited by M+ Curator Pauline J. Yao, The Part In The Story Where We Lost Count Of The Days features new essays by Nav Haq, Ahmad Mashadi, Claudia Pestana, and Tirdad Zolghadr, and an illustrated project index by Amanda Lee Koe and Pauline J. Yao.

Heman Chong is an artist, curator and writer whose conceptually charged investigations into how individuals and communities imagine the future generates a multiplicity of objects, images, installations, situations and texts. In 2006, he produced a writing workshop with Leif Magne Tangen at Project Arts Center in Dublin where they co-authored PHILIP, a science fiction novel, with Mark Aerial Waller, Cosmin Costinas, Rosemary Heather, Francis McKee, David Reinfurt and Steve Rushton. Chong is currently directing 'Moderation(s)', an ongoing project occurring between Witte de With in Rotterdam and Spring Workshop in Hong Kong, which will engender a conference, three exhibitions, three residencies, and a book of short stories.