Yavuz Gallery is proud to return to the Armory Show with In My Head, a solo presentation by emerging Singaporean-artist Alvin Ong. Located at Booth 405 at the Galleries Section, the presentation marks Ong’s first debut in the United States. One of the most exciting young figurative painters in Asia, Ong is known for his intimate works that capture quotidian moments of our contemporary world in surreal bodily compositions, playfully combining diverse visual vocabularies.
Consisting of 108 self-portraits, In My Head is a monumental and immersive installation reflecting the artist’s ongoing interests in the physicality of the body, as well as how our human experiences, both online and offline, are being reshaped in the current moment.
Through vignettes of everyday life, the vocabulary of the mundane is transformed into a site of spectacle, a cabinet of curiosities in which audiences are implicated as flaneur and voyeur. Individually isolated against surreal hues evoking both natural and artificial light, each portrait is painted from memory, evoking both the artist’s lived experience as well as the artist’s fertile imagination. The body is presented as a site of metamorphosis: glitchy, isolated, intersecting, merging and colliding across different planes. Oscillating between restlessness and desire, they capture the ephemerality of a collective psyche, isolated and estranged in our own skins, moving endlessly between online avatars, filtered profile images, apps, chats, and real-life interaction.
Based between Singapore and London, Alvin Ong (b. 1988) is a graduate of the Ruskin School of Art, University of Oxford, UK (2016) and the Royal College of Art, London, UK (2018). His paintings playfully combine diverse visual vocabularies alongside his own lived experience of hybridity and distance across a variety of spaces, physical and virtual. He was awarded a residency in 2017 with the Royal Drawing School, as well as the 2018 Chadwell Award. His works have been exhibited at the Singapore Art Museum (2007, 2012, 2013), Asian Civilizations Museum, Singapore (2010), Peranakan Museum, Singapore (2015), Northampton Contemporary, UK (2017), National Portrait Gallery, UK (2018), and Royal Academy of Arts, UK (2019). His works are collected by the ILHAM Gallery, Malaysia, X Museum China, the Ingram Collection, UK, and the Victoria & Albert Museum (Print Collection), London, UK.