Wei-Ling Contemporary is pleased to present Be Careful or You May Become The Centre, a solo exhibition by Malaysian contemporary artist Chong Kim Chiew.

Featuring large scale paintings on tarpaulin and video work, this exhibition marks the artist’s first solo exhibition with the gallery.

Chong’s paintings work through the idea of ‘trace’ including the notion of tracing, usage of tracing-paper, copying, and the one who traces – to seek, trail and explore the roots or deeper meanings of something. These are the expression of the power structure of geography, the flow of history and overlaps of identities.

Chong’s installation work invites the artist to drift away, raising questions of place and non-place, and the negotiation between the individual, fluidity and territory. The artist’s maps on tarpaulin are made of endless layers and erasures of paint, as if the memory of place is reset to zero each time when a destination has finally appeared to be recognisable. His handling with his soft-sculpture-like painting has created a significant twist in his in-situ practice in the art of installation. The maps are no longer bounded to a place, but transformable and responsive to places where they are shown, By further confronting the maps to the physical yet unidentified deserted landscapes in his video work, the artist has dissociated the making of maps from the place, thus liberating the authority/ownership from each other. These maps have been a decade long project, which the artist embarked upon beginning in 2004 and is an ongoing journey for him.

His artworks provoke us to think (and rethink) about our national developments and aspirations.

Chong Kim Chiew (b. 1975) lives and works in Kuala Lumpur. His works have been widely exhibited in China, France, Indonesia, Malaysia, the Philippines, Taiwan and Singapore.

Be Careful or You May Become the Centre will begin showing at Wei-Ling Contemporary on the 25th of September and will continue until the 30th of November 2015.

Wei-Ling Contemporary is located at RT01 Sixth Floor, The Gardens Mall, 59200, Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia.

Please call 0322828323/ 0322601106 or email weiling.shaz@gmail.com for more information.