Roberto Chabet’s ‘To Be Continued: Hong Kong’ brings together selected works by the artist from the 1980s to the present that utilize his signature materials - plywood, metal sheets and other common and found objects. Highlighting process and the provisional nature of these materials, the exhibition illuminates a key aspect of Chabet’s practice, which gives precedence to the fugitive and contingent nature of art.

Included in the exhibition are works from ‘To Be Continued’, a landmark survey exhibition of Chabet’s plywood works that was first presented in the Institute of Contemporary Art, Singapore - La Salle College of the Arts last January 2011. In these works, Chabet uses plywood panel boards, a material, which has become not only the surface and support of his paintings and installations, but to a large extent their subject matter and content.

Chabet pays homage to the breakthroughs in representation by the early avant-gardes and similarly extends the use of ‘real materials in real space’. By doing so he dissolves the barrier between art and life and creates art that cuts through illusion. His aporetic use of objects and shelves attached onto wall panels blurs the distinction between the two-dimensional space of painting and the three- dimensionality of sculpture, presenting itself not just as a substitute for reality, but is actually reality itself.

His seemingly ‘purely’ geometric and abstract plywood constructions reveal finer hints. Often he would juxtapose them with particular everyday objects that would appear and re-appear in his other installations and become part of his familiar inventory of anxious objects—neon lights, clocks, boats, shells, clipboards, mirrors, maps, tables, parachutes, globes, walking canes, billiard balls—apparently random yet linked by the idea of temporality, process, voyage, and a fascination with history, time and space.

Displacement and shifts in meaning are recurring undertones in Chabet’s vast body of works, and are heightened especially in his ‘diptych’ installations and companion pieces such as ‘Intermediate Geography’, a two-part installation first made in 2005, which is re-installed for the second time in Hong Kong this year. The work is a study of textures, angles, precision and contradictions, and other dichotomies. Here Chabet contrasts the blankness of raw, unpainted plywood boards with the undulating sheen of galvanized iron sheets and combines these with neon texts, a body bag stuffed with a velvet comforter, a photograph of a secret police archive reproduced in a book, paintings of the Unabomber’s cabin, and several upturned houses whose insides are lined with mirrors.

‘Onethingafteranother’ (2011) is Chabet’s largest and most recent installation using GI sheets laid out on the floor, industrial emergency lamps and neon texts - objects of physical and metaphorical illumination. Referring to the post-war utterance of Donald Judd, the work echoes the idea of seriality and progression in Minimal art, while signifying a continuum, which is constantly re-called, re-ordered, re-assembled - always in flux.

Similarly his new series of drawings, ‘Imagined Geographies’ (2011), exhibited simultaneously in Osage Soho, manifest an internal volatility, a precariousness that can be seen in the quivering pencil lines that delineate and demarcate spaces. Also installed one after the other, they reveal a process that belies our understanding of place, which for Chabet is neither fixed, nor predetermined, rather it is a fluid, ambiguous field that points to an elsewhere.

Roberto Chabet’s ‘To Be Continued: Hong Kong’ is presented by Osage Art Foundation in cooperation with King Kong Art Projects Unlimited and is part of the ‘Chabet: 50 Years’ year-long series of exhibitions in various venues in Manila, Hong Kong and Singapore throughout 2011 - 2012. The series is organized by King Kong Art Projects Unlimited, an independent artist group based in Manila, in celebration of Roberto Chabet's fifty years of pioneering conceptual work and his role in shaping Philippine art. For more information, please visit www.kingkongartprojects.org.