Body and blood seems like the perfect title to an Alvin Ong exhibition. His second solo show in Australia, this one at Ames Yavuz in Sydney, feels like the artist is fully in bloom with the audience, a conscious examination of home and place, an opening of his soul in all its depth in terms of religion and coming of age narratives and even mundane in-between moments of everyday tasks. It's like a diary of how life can be just as fascinating, that ritual can be so simple, even in the chores of everyday life. With the backdrop of what the gallery notes is "the rituals of inclusion and exclusion," the works explore Ong's life in both London and Singapore, fantastical and also metaphysical. Food becomes holy and the body becomes malleable.
The gallery notes "These themes are an undercurrent throughout the show, inhabiting a unique velocity and freely moving between the physical and metaphysical." Ong says, "I see the body as a vehicle for desire, but also a vessel for the possible." In this way, and what Ong is always so wonderful at displaying, is that the body is a marker of time, both spent and the dreams of what will be. He moves the body like a flexible object to move through time but also a solid object that is very real and very rooted. —Evan Pricco
