AT HOME WITH THE BODY

As the city gears up for Singapore Art Week, South-east Asia's largest art fair Art SG returns to Marina Bay Sands from Jan 19 to 21, gathering 115 galleries from 33 countries and territories. We showcase homegrown talent ALVIN ONG, one of Asia's most exciting young figurative painters.

- Y-JEAN MUN-DELSALLE

In Alvin Ong's surreal oil paintings of the human face and figure, ambiguity plays a leading role. His subjects could be anonymous bodies intertwining around one another with where one stops and the next one begins unclear or, alternatively, multiple perspectives of the same person endowed with extra limbs that suggest a variety of poses struck over time.

"It's a vehicle for desire, but also a vessel for the possible," says the Singaporean artist, explaining his fascination with the human body. "I love to play with its proportions, exaggerate, conceal, expand and contract it like an abstract form."

Capturing intimate everyday moments, Ong's unwieldy, distorted bodies verging on the grotesque are coupled with rich narratives where every detail counts. A takeaway plastic bag filled with tea hangs off the handlebars of a bicycle with a myna bird sitting on the back seat, a nude body lies with his dog beside a half-read book, an open laptop and a plate of nasi lemak (local Malay fare), and a man soaking in his bathtub stares at his glowing mobile phone screen surrounded by a half-eaten bowl of noodles and an almost empty red wine glass. The viewer can't help but stop and stare, seduced by these compositions, like a voyeur privy to very personal scenes of daily life.

Ong describes his process: "I begin by drawing directly on the canvas, and then improvising and going with the flow. The figure often comes first. I have a rough idea of the narratives I like to play with, but quite often ideas get tossed out quickly if they don't match the scale. I often use the Doodle app on my phone to try resolve the situation.