STPI – Creative Workshop & Gallery

Foreign Affairs #237

Artist Profile

Foreign Affairs is a series of photographs of embassy backdoors. The artist began photographing these backdoors while on vacation. He would later return to this brief moment and examine the image(s) by systematically repeating them.

As a literal and cumulative representation of embassy backdoors, each image of a backdoor can be read as infrastructural. The image makes apparent the very form of the non-descript embassy backdoor and its component parts, such as the lone face of a strategically positioned surveillance camera. These backdoors are the threshold of the exceptional space of the embassy, a physical manifestation
of a concept as immaterial as the mutual acknowledgement between two states of their respective sovereignty and legitimacy, and the exceptional powers that come with this conceit.

Foreign Affairs are presented as curtains or as canvas paintings, literal thresholds between spaces that can conceal or reveal.

For other works by Heman Chong please visit: https://pubhtml5.com/umoh/qosp