Order and chaos, the calm art of Heman Chong does not reflect the disorder in his life

Heman Chong maintains a balance between erudite artistic insight and jovial self-deprecation that is as disconcerting as it is charming. Primarily a conceptual artist based in Singapore, he is also a curator and author who has received acclaim in the art world in recent years.

When we meet, Chong is attempting to get through what he refers to as "yet another laborious edit" of his latest novel, tentatively named Prospectus. "It is kind of like a narrative that occurs between two people. It starts at the part where they realise that they have never understood each other even after being in a relationship for nearly 10 years," he says.

The novel takes place over the course of just three hours, but has taken Chong five years to write - and subsequently rewrite. "I'm not trained in literature and my publisher keeps coming back to me to do rewrites because the book just sucks. Writing a novel is just so much hard work. It is so different from being a visual artist. With art, you tend to be able to get away with cleverly concealed comments in a way that is not true in writing. You can't cheat. It is heartbreaking because people know quickly if it is good or bad."

This delicate balancing act of art, literature and curation is a skill Chong has been honing throughout his career. "I am one of those oddballs who have developed a strategy that allows me to move between lots of things for the greater part of my life," he says.

It is with this sense of plasticity in purpose that he has approached the role of curator for "Moderation(s)", a multidisciplinary programme developed and supported by Witte de With Centre for Contemporary Art in Rotterdam, and the new non-profit arts space Spring Workshop in Hong Kong. "The programme will occur over a series of activities," says Chong. "I want to see them as a set of events that will have no relation to each other except that they will involve a kind of attitude. In my opinion, this is a prevailing ethos in what we consider contemporary art practise today. It is kind of a run between the legacies of conceptual art and performance art."

The "Moderation(s)" programme started in August with "Guilty Pleasures", pegged as a "listening party" presented and developed by Singaporean performance artist Ang Song Ming, in which artist and audience presented a song each to illustrate their guiltiest listening pleasure. Cheesy electro, punk rock and other forms of aural nostalgia filled the yet-to-be-completed Spring Workshop in Aberdeen well into the night, carrying on later at a Wan Chai karaoke bar.

"You could really sense where I am coming from with the 'Moderation(s)' programme at this event," Chong says. "Throughout there needs to be a lot of involvement from the audience. They needed to come with a song and confess their deepest, darkest perception of what that song meant."