Artist Spotlight: Alvin Ong
8 Aug 2024
“What would it mean for our bodies to refuse to cohere? To relax into, dissolve into the messiness of our interiorities, to let the body say “I am hurting” or “I am lonely”, and for the solution not to be discipline, but a kind of efflorescence, for the body to be held in community, shared queer interiorities aligning.“Joel Tan, in his accompanying essay for Ong’s recent solo exhibition at Ames Yavuz Sydney titled Body and blood.
Alvin Ong (b. 1988, Singapore) is one of Asia’s leading painters based between Singapore and London, capturing intimate, introspective moments of the everyday to explore how we inhabit our bodies in a hyperconnected world.
Drawing on Cubist manipulations of perspectives and a Mannerist refinement of forms and light, his formal dexterity dovetails with a conceptual sensitivity to social interconnection and queer identity. Ong’s figures remain evasive, often blending into their surroundings through material play and a rhythmic quality with painterly light and transparency. Obfuscating the distinction between private and public spaces, viewers are implicit in voyeurism through a glimpse of its subject; an ambivalent space where the inside and outside meet.
Of late, both food and music are recurring overarching themes in Ong’s paintings. References to memory and family traditions are freely interwoven with the artists own imaginations and lived experiences with his partner. Often stemming from childhood memories, Ong’s motifs evoke a sense of nostalgia and a form of love language. They act as a site for celebration, memorialising the ones who feed and love us, as well as those we choose to love.
Upcoming: The Armory Show 2024, New York
As part of the gallery’s participation at The Armory Show, Ong presents Love of my life. Titled after a song by Freddie Mercury, this work refashions the nativity subject told through the lens of a queer couple. The kitchen is loosely based on memories of the Ong’s late grandfather’s kitchen that functions as markers of identity, nostalgia and cultural memory.
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