One of Southeast Asia’s most dynamic figurative painters of his generation, Alvin Ong (b. 1988, Singapore) captures scenes of restlessness, boredom, desire, and queer intimacy. His paintings capture quotidian moments of our contemporary world in surreal bodily compositions, playfully combining diverse visual vocabularies. Through vignettes of everyday life, the vocabulary of the mundane is transformed into a site of spectacle, a cabinet of curiosities in which audiences are implicated as flaneur and voyeur. Ong’s experience living between Singapore and London manifests as a surreal reality in his works, where objects of travel are echoed by objects of rootedness. Food references, sacred imagery, and art historical references are scattered throughout, functioning as markers of identity, nostalgia and cultural memory. A suitcase morphs into a bed. A Singaporean suburb merges into the Brighton coastline over a long-distance video call. A festive hotpot reunion merges into the sunset. A park is a silent witness to both conventional love and queer intimacy. Contrasting moods and moments are stitched together as a palimpsest of memory with a fluid and dreamy sensibility in his compositions, exploring the tenderness, contradictions, anxieties of our contemporary urban life. Ong is a graduate of the Ruskin School of Art, University of Oxford, UK (2016) and the Royal College of Art, London, UK (2018). He was awarded a residency in 2017 with the Royal Drawing School, the 2018 Chadwell Award, and 2019 Ingram Collection Prize for Young Contemporary Talent. In 2022, Ong was a finalist of the Sovereign Asian Art Prize. His works have been exhibited at the Singapore Art Museum (2007, 2012, 2013), Asian Civilizations Museum, Singapore (2010), Peranakan Museum, Singapore (2015), Northampton Contemporary, UK (2017), National Portrait Gallery, UK (2018), and Royal Academy of Arts, UK (2019). His works are collected by the Sunpride Foundation (Hong Kong), Peranakan Museum (Singapore), UOB Collection (Singapore), ILHAM Gallery (Malaysia), X Museum (China), Fosun Foundation (China), the Ingram Collection (UK), and the Victoria & Albert Museum, Print Collection (London, UK); and in numerous private collections worldwide. He currently lives and works in Singapore and London.
