Reinterpreting scientific concepts and future civilisations
By Lim Sheau Yun

Adam Phong, ‘One of Our Fossils’, installation view at A+ Works of Art. Photo by Alvin Lau. Image courtesy of the artist and A+ Works of Art.

Adam Phong (b. 2002, Malaysia) is an artist who works across installation, sculpture, sound and scent. Currently, his work studies our times and questions how future civilisations will interpret our era. He explores scientific concepts and their broader implications for humanity.

As you walk through the door into the gallery, you are confronted with what seems to be an opening to a tunnel. It is a 17-metre-long sculpture that invites you to peer into its hollow insides, a horn-like appendage that trails upwards then turns to peek round the central wall dividing the gallery space. The gallery is awash in a yellow hazard light and pungent with the smell of incense. It is only upon close examination that one realizes that it is made entirely of chicken bones.

Is it a portal? A sandworm? A snake with its mouth flayed open in anticipation of engulfing one whole? “Humans like to create meaning where there is none,” Adam Phong, the artist behind the work remarks.

For ‘One of Our Fossils’, Adam’s first solo exhibition at A+ Works of Art, Adam spent every day of sixteen months collecting chicken bones, visiting fast food restaurants and local cafes with a large garbage bag claiming that it was for his dog. The bones, once collected, went through a painstaking cleaning process: boiling, scrubbing with a toothbrush, soaking in chemical solutions, and sun-drying for days before drilling into and wiring them together. Adam notes that chicken bones will outnumber human ones in the fossil record of our time: so prolific is our consumption of chicken, and its accompanying chicken industry, where these birds are bred for our protein intake. Adam’s resultant sculptures reach for a poetics of industry, where an product that sustains human life is put through a one-person industrial process, and are aggregated into objects so large they dwarf a person, or so small that they can be cradled in a hand. Adam’s chicken bones, reduced now into nothing but calcium carbonate, are hollow, almost porcelain.

Adam Phong’s six month plan and schedule. Image courtesy of the artist.

Yet, Adam’s ultimate fascination is not with the material, but with a willingness of an artist to surrender to a way of life. He cites the work of Taiwanese performance artist Teh Ching-Hsieh and shows me his schedule for the past few months. Gym, bones, gym, bones, gym, bones, gym, bones… When he started this artwork sixteen months ago, Adam was “fragile.” To commit to a work so physical in nature required a commitment to himself. Like the booming command of Rainer Maria Rilke’s torso of Apollo, the work gave him a charge: “You must change your life.”

Adam Phong, ‘Perfectelse’, 2023, calico, scent (clove, bergamot, cypress, cedarwood), single channel audio, various works, 322 x 230 x 410cm. Image courtesy of the artist.

This notion of surrender is perhaps the best way to thread the line to his previous work. For ‘Perfectelse,’ a 2023 installation at Cult Gallery, Adam used chance as a decision-making process: he rolled a dice to decide what to paint, or threw a dart on a canvas to decide where to paint. His paintings and drawings acted together in a restrained colour palette of black-and-white, with the occasional flash of red. In conversation last year, I remarked to Adam that in this set of work, he had predetermined the possibility of his choices by setting forth a limited set of parameters. This randomness was born out of indecision, and to a certain extent, fear. While some aesthetic impulses remain from his previous work—the light trailing out of a door askew—for example, his practice is now grounded in a palpable sense of risk: both personal and, increasingly, aesthetic. The rewards are plenty.

At 21 years old, Adam is free from the burdens of age, free to change his life. Holding on to this naïveté would serve him well.

Click here to read our dialogue with Adam Phong, where he speaks about his transition to a sculptural, object-based practice, and his first solo exhibition at A+ Works of Art, ‘One of Our Fossils’.