Heman Chong has focused on a trans-cultural negotiation as the core of his work, and has collaborated with artists, choreographers and musicians in his multi-disciplinary practice including performance, video and installation. "Real Estate - 100 Aerial Drawings" is a web-based project that transforms existing architectures into pictograms that adapt to the advantages two-dimensional images possess when presented on a flat computer screen. Chong collected satellite pictures of Singapore, the city he grew up in, and traced 100 existing building shapes from a bird’s-eye view. Each drawing is paired with an actual address, and is colored red on white (the colors of the Singaporean flag). Various buildings—-shapes of which range from simple rectangles to more intricate forms--can be downloaded as virtual “properties”. The mellow soundtrack was composed by Toru Yamanaka, a Japanese musician, especially for this project. Mapping physical urban sites into digital forms and transforming the existing volumes of buildings into flat pictograms, Chong challenges the historical, topographical and political restrictions of the city, deconstructing them across computers around the world. Strongly inspired by science fiction, he digitizes physical space to transform a site into a non-site.

• Yukie Kamiya