#spygenre

[storytimebyrk]

Terror Beneath the Golden Sand

John Montgomery changed identities as some changed clothes. He had it ready as soon as he got his assignment. He landed in South Africa, Capetown, as a new man, stylish and expensive clothes, a large gold watch and pinkie ring, and expensive shoes made for him in Italy. “Merci,” he told the concierge at the desk. He rolled up his sleeves, the spider tattoo visible, and signed the hotel register…

Terror Beneath the Golden Sand

[hemanchong]

In #CallForTheDead (2020)—83 black-and-white scans of pages from the eponymous #1961 novel by #JohnLeCarré, screen-printed on linen and hung in a grid-like formation in a long, white-walled gallery—Chong takes his experiments with text into new territory. The #ColdWar fantasies of the mid-century #spygenre might here be read as a comment on #decoloniality: the novel was written while #LeCarré was working as a spy for #MI6—which had a regional outpost in #Singapore. Chong has intervened in this text by #redacting everything but the verbs: “#killed […] #fired […] #remembered […] #fought,” reads one cluster. Among the most impactful yet #enigmatic works in the show, the prints have an #ambiguous quality, at once #pictorial and #linguistic, #physical and seemingly #immaterial. Chong is a writer as well as an artist, and his engagement with historical, political, fictional, and philosophical texts—as indicated here—point to an interest in how knowledge and power are constructed through the interplay of images and words. As the repeated pages in Call for the Dead indicate, the grid—with its flattened, geometric, and ordered structure—is a motif of this exhibition. In the 2018 photo series “#ForeignAffairs,” for instance, Chong has photographed the back entrances of embassies and printed them in a grid formation on canvases and on curtains, where regimented sequences of images depict windows, fences, doors, mirrors, gates, brick walls, and barbed wire overgrown with plants. Out of these repetitions and variations emerges the sense of an architectural type: the artist here seems interested in bringing to light how the #mythical function of embassies, as symbols of #protection and #power, are physically constituted. Text by @chris.han2021 Published by @art.agenda_ #HemanChong @stpi_gallery #stpiGallery (at STPI - Creative Workshop & Gallery) https://www.instagram.com/p/CR64SRLlTjS/?utm_medium=tumblr