Alvin Ong: Sayang

Anat Ebgi is pleased to announce Sayang, an exhibition by Singaporean artist Alvin Ong. This is Ong’s first solo presentation in the United States and with the gallery. On view at 6150 Wilshire Blvd in Los Angeles from May 24 through June 28. An opening reception will take place on Saturday, May 24 from 5-7pm.

Ong is known for his paintings that capture rituals of queer diasporic identity and community in surreal, bodily imagery. His scenes of intimate domestic moments and introspective private rituals, created for this exhibition were completed during the past year in between his studios in London and Singapore—imbuing the works with a dreamy and transitory sensibility. The paintings stir the kind of existentialism and wistfulness one feels looking at the world from an airplane window—flashes of memory and hopes for the future.

Mining tropes of identity and cultural memory, Ong’s allegorical spaces of belonging subvert our expectations of reality, held together by a sense of fragility. Food references and objects function as charged markers of both memory and nostalgia, associated freely alongside references to sacred imagery, art history, and ordinary lived experience. The glow of a cellphone, steamy embrace in a bathhouse, or a stack of bowls are treated with equal symbolic importance.

Ong’s figures remain evasive, often camouflaged within their surroundings through painterly layers of light and transparency. Screens and reflections obscure or reveal their subjects in equal measure. Blurring the distinction between private and public spaces, viewers are implicated as voyeurs through glimpses of Ong’s subjects; his treatment of the delineations of space—figure/ground, inside/outside, psychological/physical—leans into a territory of ambivalence, opening the paintings up to multiple readings.

The compositions are dominated by recurrent soft, bulbous forms. Solid, yet yielding, suggesting flesh, cloud, stone, vessel, halo, hands, and feet. At times they coalesce against the edges of the canvas in Baroque ecstasy, supported or bound by the edge of the picture, erupting and dissolving inward. In a suite comprising five canvases, Quintet for a new Beginning, Ong layers narrative elements with explorations of a shifting landscape. Repeated across the canvases, the motif of a hand acts as a vessel, a frame, a catalyst of change.

This fluid sensibility in form and meaning lends itself to the title of the show, Sayang, a word of Malay origin commonly used in Singlish (or colloquial Singaporean English). The word translates to “love” or “darling,” and entwines together the threads of intimacy throughout the show. However in particular contexts, Sayang can also signify “pity” or “regret,” heightening Ong’s explorations of the insecurities that arise in the search for selfhood. Sayang is a filter, a lens capable of illuminating the inherent beauty and tension between desire, distance, and belonging.