“To me, everything is art.”

It is a simple belief, but one that says a great deal about how Eiffel Chong approaches photography. For Eiffel, art becomes interesting when it takes him somewhere unexpected. His practice has led him to explore places beyond traditional art spaces, from medical centres to a high school in London, looking for the banal details, silent landscapes and curious observations that can reveal something more.
In 2026, that curiosity brought him to Rovski. We sat down with Eiffel to learn more about his approach to photography, what drew him to an industrial environment, and what he discovered along the way.

Q: How would you describe your approach to photography?
Eiffel: I am interested in how the photographic medium can translate a particular time and space, memories and thoughts into something permanent. I personally think that the images say more with less, and make one just want to stare and think about it.

Q: What interested you about collaborating with Rovski?
Eiffel: One thing that made art interesting is to explore other industries that are not related to art. To me, everything is art, and being able to go to an institution that I have never been to before and explore the artistic value of it is something that really interests me.
I spent two years photographing medical centres and an academic year photographing a high school in London. I enjoy exploring the abstract concepts of life and death through the banal details, silent landscapes and curious obsessions I observe from daily life.

Q: How has working with Rovski changed the way you look at industry?
Eiffel: One thing that I learnt from working with Rovski is the different point of view of what art is. To a lot of the technicians in the Research and Development Department, the experimental items that they threw away were just trash, but when I first saw them, I told them to keep everything for me because they were such beautiful art objects. The technicians were amused and didn't quite see what I saw in them.
I was attracted to the abstract form of the colour, shape and texture of the sealant that these technicians had produced. By combining and rearranging them in a specific way, the so-called junk was turned into an interesting piece of abstract artwork.

Q: What do you hope people take away from this collaboration?
Eiffel: Art and science shouldn’t be divided. Growing up in a public education system, most of us were classified as a science student or an art student, and we all grew up believing that both of these disciplines were very different and shouldn’t be mixed.
We think of science as exact and objective, following a strict method, whereas art is creative and subjective, with no formal rules.
I think it is time to give up the myth that science and art are fundamentally different. Good science is an art form, and scientists draw on highly trained, creative intuition and judgement, just as much as artists do.
To extend the analogy, scientists are like artists trying to recreate a still-life scene. Artists work carefully, with constant reference back to the scene in front of them, guided by highly trained intuition and judgement. They look at the work of their peers, read descriptions of how others proceeded, and try their best to borrow the good bits and create new approaches when old ones don’t fit their goals. So do the scientists.

At Rovski, the Rovski Art Initiative is an ongoing exploration of what can happen when art and industry come together. Through Eiffel's work, an industrial environment becomes a space for observation, discovery and interpretation, revealing details and possibilities that might otherwise go unnoticed.
We are pleased to present the first public presentation of work from our ongoing collaboration with Eiffel Chong at CIMB Artober 2026, where visitors can experience his perspective firsthand.
See industry through a different lens at CIMB Artober 2026, 27 October–1 November at Ombak KLCC.