Another Life presents a new body of work by Alvin Ong that bears witness to the transition, and recovery from the artist’s self-confessed burnout in 2025. What has emerged are beguiling layers of multiplicity and texture. Bodies thin into ethereal translucency. They blend and bleed. Individual faces can be made out, encased in their own melancholy, sometimes contorted into split, or fractured souls.
Heads serve as receptacles for other tableaux. Eyes are deliberately omitted or painted over like a blindfold or reflected surface.
Screens are a recurrent motif, implicating the viewer as spectator. A recent evolution in his practice is the introduction of texts and embedded rhinestones. They draw reference to the devotional act of painting and the religious iconography he was exposed to growing up. In Residues, a new series on found antique blinds and signboards from Singapore, fragments of historically painted symbols, text and imagery are imaginatively reconfigured alongside lived experience, real and imagined. Painting emerges as palimpsest, but also an act of queering, in the artist’s words, “they hold space not just for the body, but also for imagining: that we could have lived many lives, and many versions of ourselves.”
Daryl Lim Wei Jie, a Singaporean poet, literary curator, and art critic, has written a text reflecting on Alvin Ong’s work in Another Life.
Daryl Lim Wei Jie – Another Life essay
