Alvin Ong: Private Pleasures
Past exhibition
Overview
BANK is pleased to present "Private Pleasures", Alvin Ong's debut exhibition in Shanghai. Characterised by fluid compositions and surrealist forms, Ong's dreamy paintings fuse the external world with the internal, continuing his interest in the physicality of the body and explorations of introspection, longing and loneliness.
Throughout the surfaces of his canvases figures are presented as a site of metamorphosis: distorting and colliding with one another, accentuating the relationship between the mind and body and reflecting the artist's ongoing investigation of how our human experiences are being reshaped in our current digital age.
Drawing on the artist's lived experiences and as well as his own fertile imagination, the body's appetites take centre stage, as narratives of love, longing and loss, collide in a series of fragmented, yet intimate scenes in these latest works. Limbs grasp and idly reach for one another and their devices in search of connectivity and intimacy; eyelids are painted often shut; and pictorial screens simultaneously demarcate and blur exterior and interior realms. Food references and phones are a recurrent motif, functioning as physical projections and manifestations of their multiple interior lives.
Successive head portraits, all gathered in isolation and individually separated by their individual canvas frames, are evocative of a virtual gathering of sorts, transforming the gallery floor into a stage, implicating viewers as both audience and voyeur.
"Private Pleasures" is presented in collaboration with Yavuz Gallery.
Throughout the surfaces of his canvases figures are presented as a site of metamorphosis: distorting and colliding with one another, accentuating the relationship between the mind and body and reflecting the artist's ongoing investigation of how our human experiences are being reshaped in our current digital age.
Drawing on the artist's lived experiences and as well as his own fertile imagination, the body's appetites take centre stage, as narratives of love, longing and loss, collide in a series of fragmented, yet intimate scenes in these latest works. Limbs grasp and idly reach for one another and their devices in search of connectivity and intimacy; eyelids are painted often shut; and pictorial screens simultaneously demarcate and blur exterior and interior realms. Food references and phones are a recurrent motif, functioning as physical projections and manifestations of their multiple interior lives.
Successive head portraits, all gathered in isolation and individually separated by their individual canvas frames, are evocative of a virtual gathering of sorts, transforming the gallery floor into a stage, implicating viewers as both audience and voyeur.
"Private Pleasures" is presented in collaboration with Yavuz Gallery.
Installation Views
Works
