Heng has devised a highly mannered, flat, linear style with which he brings together a bewildering range of images. Every work is saturated in such arcane signs, many of which represent notional opposites. Birds are either captive or free. Ships sometimes float, and sometimes are shown sinking. Trees are either bare or in full fruit.
Animals run wild or are tamed.
His main protagonist, the stocky man with the unchanging face, appears quite powerless to affect change. Even as he stands on the seashore watching a ship sinking, he remains totally unmoved. He is merely a voyeur. He makes nothing happen. Which is appropriate, in a way, because in his apparent impotence, this figure seems to embody the inability of the artist himself to combine all these multifarious references into any sort of meaningful narrative structure.