Singapore artist uses Straits Times to illustrate distortions of news media
A newspaper friendly to the Singapore government is the focus of Singaporean conceptual artist Heman Chong’s latest exhibition, in Hong Kong, which seeks to represent visually the way news is sometimes manipulated
Abstracts from The Straits Times, a new series by Singaporean conceptual artist Heman Chong, uses one of the best-known organs of state propaganda in Asia as raw material for a visual rumination about how news is distorted, consumed, regurgitated and reinforced.
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Using a digital archive of old editions of the paper from 2010-17, he has remade (or rather, defaced) pages by scanning them and superimposing multiple copies on top of each other to the extent that the words are barely visible.
It is no secret that The Straits Times is closely monitored by Singapore’s government. But Chong says his work addresses the wider issue of documentaries versus propaganda, and the more surreptitious aspects of information transmission.
He is also spurred on by the frustration over Singapore’s reticence about speaking out. One of the pages he picked was published in 2016 and the headline on a story about the award-winning film Apprentice appeared to underplay the fact that it was about Singapore’s controversial death penalty.
“The film is all about the death penalty. We have this evasive way of talking in Singapore. I am like a teenager, wanting people to just say things out loud,” he says.