Ways of Holding: Alvin Ong
A series of conversations with the artists of Ways of Holding, exploring what is carried, remembered, and held through becoming.
Alvin Ong’s paintings capture quotidian moments in surreal bodily compositions, exploring themes of intimacy, longing and hybridity. He lives and works in Singapore and London.
Q1. How do you think your work sits in the theme ‘ways of holding’?
AO: They hold space for the body, or also lack thereof. They also hold space for the possibility that we could have lived many lives and many versions of ourselves. They are multiple lovers, or it can be just the one actor flitting from one scene to the next.
Q2. What does becoming look like to you now?
AO: It’s a never ending process. I love reminding myself of Eva Hesse’s words in my dry spells, “You must begin by making small things as that starts [the] cycle going. Doing begins things and it continues. It is always that way.”
Q3. What is something your work is holding at this moment: a memory, a feeling, a tension, a question? What forms, gestures, objects, or images do you find yourself returning to again and again?
AO: I draw on memories, both real and imagined, and on the stream of imagery we encounter physically and virtually. I sketch from life a lot, and over time, the sketchbook has become an archive. Sometimes the references come from cinema or from paintings I adore.
The soldiers in Parade Lover, for example, come from The Forgotten Guard by 20th-century Greek painter Yannis Tsarouchis. In this iteration, however, they somehow feel more like the soldiers from the film Mishima.
I also find something really romantic and intimate in painting: the accumulation of thousands of caresses of the brush.
Q4. Is there a detail in the work that you hope people spend time with?
AO: Try to see if you can find my signature on the princess gown, haha. I also love how queerness goes hand in hand with camouflage.
Q5. What does queerness open up for you as a way of seeing, making, or being in the world?
AO: I’m very much drawn to storytelling and I try to keep the process of image making very fluid, and I improvise a lot.
It keeps it real for me. Figures appear and dissolve. Meanings of objects shape shift. In this context, I see the act of painting in relation to putting on make up, and the fabrics as extensions of how we perform our identities.
Painting on apparel was a first for me, but I really enjoyed working with its unique materialities. For example, the exposed back of the arc back drape shirt dress in midnight called out to me as though it needed to catch something, which led to the idea of a hood catching a durian. That idea didn’t work at all for the open back drape sleeveless dress in cool grey, however, so it eventually transformed into a royal sash.
In Alvin Ong’s works, the body becomes a site of movement, performance, and possible selves. Figures appear, shift, and dissolve across surfaces, carrying with them fragments of memory, cinema, desire, and everyday encounter.
Within Ways of Holding, his painted garments hold space for multiplicity: for the lives we have lived, the selves we rehearse, and the versions of ourselves still becoming.
This conversation is the third in a series leading up to Ways of Holding, an exhibition bringing together works by Chuen Kah Jun, Dylan Chan, Alvin Ong, and Suhui Hee.
We hope you’ll join us for Ways of Holding,
opening 20th June 5:00pm - 6:30pm at r y e New Bahru.
Meet the artists, and view and acquire selected works, with a portion of sales supporting queer organisations. A small museum gift shop will accompany the exhibition.