Book of Confusions, is a special artist’s book written by Fatoş Üstek published to coincide with Heman Chong’s solo exhibition LEM1.
The book incorporates an adult version of a reading game, where pages of the book are to be read according to a sequence to be determined by the throws of a dice (or, the author also suggests, you could cut up the whole book word by word and ‘write’ your own). The book is bound to confuse you (with or without the help of cigarettes and alcohol), demanding your active mental participation in the forms of retrieved memories, reflecting on philosophical questions, and word games.
Cover: Heman Chong
First published on the occasion of the solo exhibition:
LEM1
Heman Chong
22 February – 30 March 2012
ISBN 978 1 906576 28 8
Lem1
Posted by cura. magazine February 29th, 2012
by francesca cavallo
Paintings of imagined covers of real books and a collection of real books about imagined realities: Singaporean artist, curator and writer Heman Chong presents his signature paintings in his first solo exhibition in London at Rossi&Rossi. Painted sci-fi book covers together with an installation composed of hundreds of second hand sci-fi books, which visitors can purchase for as low as a £1. The work seems a homage to science fiction seen as a poetical prefiguration of the future, a narrative, visionary response to our unresolvable questions. Accompanying the exhibition is the Book of Confusions, by Fatoş Üstek (cover designed by Chong), a “customized reading game” whose instructions playfully interlace with elements of the show and resonate of the same philosophy: “One recalls an instance not only through its physical remnants, and every fiction has a reality since everything that can be imagined might take place at a certain moment in time”.