Chong’s abstractions fancy themselves part of the literary canon. Rows of pastel-coloured strokes line up in grids, one next to and atop the other. Context clues – a slideshow of books clipped from paintings in the MET collection and a Chinese wallpaper poem – suggest that these acrylic marks stand in for book spines in a self-referential roman à clef. Read them all but they’ll still only half cover another set of patterns belonging to the canvases made from repurposed curtains.
Chong was probably reading some epic while painting his Equator pictures. In the gallery, however, they make up a tame cacophony that belongs in the self-help corner of a chain bookstore basement. It’s no book burning: like Idris Khan’s multi-exposure photographs of script, Chong wheels out the same idea not one but many times too many. This spoils the plot.
