Jimmy Ong/ blog, etc.
2011/ 2012
FOST
FOST
Chinatown Suite, NUS Collection.
FOST
Transfiguration
The Private Museum, Singapore. 2011.
A joint exhibition with Wong Mei Sheong in two parts featuring four paintings of Chinese in New England. The artist revived paintings depicting coupling of Singapore friends retro-imagined as children in a faux Colonial American setting and style.
A first part of the exhibition consists of a body of sketches and watercolors from the 1980s titled Chinatown Suite, subsequently collected by NUS Museum. The artist has met Wong in Singapore in 1987 when they each had a solo show respectively at Arbour Fine Art. They met again in 2005 and every year after at a mutual friend's Chinese New Year party. This prompted the joint show as a comeback for Wong; who parallels Jimmy's situation of having married and lived abroad.
More on the two person exhibition.
More on NUS Museum collection of JImmy Ong's Chinatown Suite, works from the 80s.
Sculptures, 2011-2012
A small series of bronze marketts for life-size outdoor sculptures were casted and proposed to Fort Canning Hotel Singapore. All works in private collection.
In 1983 I attended the St Patrick Art Centre's sculpture workshop with Tan Teng Kee. Teo Eng Seng and Choy Weng Yang headed each day's critique sessions. At that time i was convinced i was heading to be a sculptor, and that my drawings are sculptor's sketches...early success with drawings took up a chunk of that career....i recall seeing a sculpture that was part of a fountain at a talk at Goethe Institute in 1980s, and how sculpture can also be an intrusion man can make in a natural landscape. These were marketts intended for a garden that did not break ground.
In foreground is workshop masters Eitaro and Richard.
In foreground is workshop masters Eitaro and Richard.
Singapore Tyler Print Institute Residency and Exhibition, 2010.
In a busy year of unusual joint venture such as this.... my skeptical response was to 'print money' at STPI, and spent many months prior to the residency to research what is iconic about the Singapore dollar bills.
In reviving the use of colours, I was surprised to discover a scholl work i made in 1976 that turn out quite similar to this seven- panels paper pulp painting. I am reminded of Teo Eng Seng's paperdyesculpt... how lonely it is to be the only person talking about a certain material/ medium... The show was sold out but i doubt Emi will invite me back.
acrylic on canvas, this was made after the Beyond LKY show at VWFA, unexhibited.
Exhibited at VWFA, Beyond LKY. available at FOST gallery for viewing.
Singapore Survey, Valentine Willie Fine Art, 2009-2012.
In 2009, Valentine Willie started an annual enterprise of procuring a thematic group show from Singapore artists beginning with 'Aircon Recession' . This is done as a school teacher giving out idiosyncratic theme for a GP paper, assembling the resultant works in six months. A set of my watercolors 'Papa Can You Hear Me' was used by ST in the year of the theme 'Beyond LKY' amidst much publicity around the 2010 exhibition as having broken a national taboo. Looking back it has been a significant series of group shows historically, possibly because it is curated by an outsider Malaysian gallerist, even as the artworks have been heavily conceptual. There has not been any Singapore group show to date that has been so social-political.