After a period in hospital, the four dispersed, never to meet again. He never recovered his full health, but his humane will never betrayed it.
Three of the seven died on the way.īy the end of his ordeal, Slav weighed 5 stone. Sheer determination had overcome bitter cold, suffocating heat, thirst, starvation and injury.
They then walked 4,000 miles south, living off the land, through the Gobi desert and over the Himalayas, until they reached India and were rescued by a Gurkha patrol. In April 1941, with the aid of the camp commandant's wife, Slav and six others escaped in a blizzard. Dispatched to Siberia, he and thousands of others were transported in open cattle trucks, in sub-zero temperatures, to the end of the line at Irkutsk, where, chained together, they were force-marched hundreds of miles to Camp 303 - which the survivors had to build from scratch. Each painting is defined by these materials and everyday parameters of Chong’s life.Slav's account started in the notorious Lubyanka prison in Moscow, as he was sentenced to 25 years' hard labour for "spying", after the 12 months of interrogation that had followed his arrest on November 19 1939. Both sets of materials are purchased off the shelf from Art Friend, an art supply store located at Bras Basah Complex. Things That Remain Unwritten (2013 - ), a later series of paintings that are wholly abstract, is evidence of this evolution.Īcross the series and the years of painting, he has worked with the same sized canvas and with the same brand of acrylic paint.
Over time, the paintings have become more painterly, incorporating gestures of exaggerated brush strokes and abstracted masses of colour to tears on His first paintings were Cover (Versions) (2009 - ), book covers for books he had not yet read but intended to read. In the process of responding to this joke, Chong has undertaken an extended interrogation of painting. His impulse to paint was inspired by a joke by the art critic, Jan Verwoert: “Why are conceptual artists painting again? Because they think it's a good idea.” He has painted since 2009, when he was commissioned to be part of a special exhibition during the Shanghai Contemporary Art Fair.
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