Chong Kim Chiew

Boundary Fluidity #25 2021

The towering maps painted on tarpaulin that comprise Chong Kim Chiew’s ‘Boundary fluidity’ series express the artist’s compulsive reorientation of geographic and political topography of Malaysia and its South-East Asian neighbours. Their large-scale, scroll-like forms enable both spatial installation and performative intervention.

Chong describes ‘Boundary fluidity’ as a deliberate misinterpretation of cartography. He works in layers of paint pours and intersecting lines, erasing and re-inscribing names, borders and topographies. Painted on waterproof tarpaulin, the works can be rolled and carried like traditional maps, and potentially — though counterintuitively — followed. This form also lends itself to presentation in a range of ways, including suspension; presented en masse, the maps take on a sculptural aspect, some hanging grandly in space, others rolled tightly, propped against walls. An accompanying video documents the tarpaulins in everyday sites — a car park, a balcony, a beach — what the artist calls ‘third spaces’, familiar yet anonymous.

Chong deconstructs representations of the idea of nation, inviting consideration of their historical, metaphorical and theoretical aspects. These works introduce an element of impermanence into the structure of the nation-state: territory becomes an aesthetic and political fiction that is anything but eternal, suggesting that the control of geographies and populations is temporal, and that symbols of power ― such as maps ― could outlast the power itself.