ALVIN ONG

The title Body and blood takes its cue from the artist’s formative years, infused with suggestions of the Catholic iconography he was exposed to growing up in Singapore. The titular work depicts a figure lying recumbent with arms open in reference to the Crucifixion_, _transported into a context of contemporary gym culture, with its rituals of belonging and the frenzied aestheticisation of the body through pain and pleasure. Allusions to devotional images of the Sacred Heart and Mater dolorosa are evident in Body and Soul, refashioned and reclaimed as a form of self-portrait. These themes are an undercurrent throughout the show, inhabiting a unique velocity and freely moving between the physical and metaphysical. In the words of the artist, “I see the body as a vehicle for desire, but also a vessel for the possible”.

In other works, Ong’s experience living between Singapore and London manifests as a surreal reality, where objects of travel are echoed by objects of rootedness. A suitcase morphs into a bed. A Singaporean suburb merges into the Brighton coastline over a long-distance video call. A bouquet turns into an outpouring of the heart. A festive hotpot reunion merges into the sunset. A park bench is a silent witness to both conventional love and queer intimacy.

Food references and individual objects, scattered throughout the show, also function as markers of identity, nostalgia and cultural memory. This is most evident in Anniversary, painted as a work of remembrance and loss, recording important family festive traditions such as the preparation of bakwan hati babi and buah keluak. Amongst the many details, the artist’s late grandfather anecdotally appears as a housefly perched on a recipe book.

Throughout _Body and blood, _contrasting moods and moments are stitched together as a palimpsest of memory, sometimes on a single canvas and sometimes juxtaposed on adjoining pieces to highlight the mood swings, contradictions, and anxieties of contemporary urban life. While the monumental Venus is depicted as an orchestra of lights, beats, sticky bodies, sweat and consumption, Jet lag is a work of lethargy, detachment and isolation. These threads of intimacy—or the lack thereof—exemplify Ong’s vocabulary of intimacy and tenderness in the everyday, found in gyms, park benches, clubs, online and offline. These rituals of identity and community invite the viewer to be part of Ong’s private worlds, and yet also implicate them as a voyeur looking from the outside in.