Yavuz Gallery Sydney is proud to present Long Distance; Singaporean-artist Alvin Ong’s debut exhibition in Australia. Steeped in Western and Asian painting traditions, as well as the narrative structures of painting within the art history canon, his figurative paintings playfully combine a diverse range of visual vocabularies. He repositions the local within a global context, considering various forms of connection, attachment and longing in relation to physical and emotional distance, situated within a broader understanding of “belonging”.

Based between London and Singapore, Ong’s latest body of work explores the accentuated emotional longings that accompany prolonged periods of isolation, distance and displacement. Released from the limitations of time and space within the physical world, his figures merge and collide across different perspectival planes in fragmented yet intimate scenes, emphasising dislocation over location. Planes of pattern and colour intersect the spaces and their respective inhabitants, never cleaving them from the site nor each other, but rather, providing them opportunity to dwell in a multitude of locations simultaneously.