Through a combination of photography, videography, and maps painted on tarpaulin, Chong appropriates the visual grammar of traditional cartography in combination with new mediums and disjunctures to challenge the historical enrolment of mapping as an instrument of division.
In pursuit of these transgressive boundaries, Chong’s critical re-examination of the map involves the performance of the ‘third space’, or what Edward Soja (1996) theorised as a space “radically open to additional otherness”, with its suggestion of a suspended situation and sense of place that is yet to be included in official discourse. The third space is imagined here as a video piece in which the tarpaulin maps become actors in unknown spaces traversed by the artist. These are non-places that are metaphorically familiar but, crucially, ambiguous and unnamed by the artist. These neglected locations - landscapes of car parks, balconies, a seashore - elude preconception and assumption, and are made meaningful instead for their in-between-ness.
