Jimmy Ong

Jimmy Ong (born 1964) is one of Singapore's preeminent artists. Ong, together with fellow artist Tan Peng, were the first two Singaporeans to come out as gay to the general public.

=Straits Times article, 5 July 1985=

On 5 July 1985, at the age of 21 years and before he came out, Ong was featured in the following Straits Times article:



Editable text of the article:

"THE STRAITS TIMES, FRIDAY. JULY 5, 1985

Life colours his art

K. MALATHY meets an interesting young artist amid his clutter of everyday life ... and death

IN A shophouse in Chinatown. Up a narrow, rickety flight of stall's, past wet washing and potted plants and a ginger cat guarding her kittens, into an untidy little room.

I meet Jimmy Ong, young man of 21, artist

Jimmy finds me a space to sit among the art books and jars of paint He produces a hand-fan to keep the heat at bay, delicately We talk.

In the background, there is the music of the Chinese flute.

Jimmy shows me his work. A series of soft watercolours which he calls Colours of the Night Self-portrait, eyes brooding behind metal rims. Gean -lined sketches of cats, of messy tables with the "everydayness" of life on them

"I like tables especially just after meals."

Jimmy also admits to an obsession with things dead and dying. His work-table has a clutter of dry leaves and flowers browning gently in a vase.

“There is something about them, something in them when they are dying ... it fascinates me and I want to get it down on paper."

He’s been painting and drawing, he says, for as long as he can remember.

‘There was nothing else to do. I had no toys to play with." he says with a shrug.

A simplistic explanation. He laughs.

“I don’t know. maybe its something inside me then "

In school. Jimmy painted am! entered competitions, winning many prizes. School prizes, local and international awards.

He's still doing it — painting and winning, that is.

Art is taking him places. Jimmy has just won a full tuition scholarship to study fine art at the Centre for Creative Studies in Michigan in the United States.

“I'll probably freeze to death or something," he says with a nonchalance that does noi hide his excitement.

Jimmy is really looking forward to his studies because it offers so much opportunity for him to taste new experiences to develop himself as a person and as an artist.

"My formal art training is practically nil so I’m really jumping at this chance."

Before he leaves. Jimmy will he holding an eight-day exhibition of his work starting tomorrow. He will display 30 or so of his watercolours. sketches and drawings.

If you wish to meet this young man. * pop by at the exhibition tomorrow. He’ll be there. Interesting as ever.

Jimmy Ong's show is at the Alliance Francaise, 4 Draycott Park, 9 am - 1 pm and 4 pm - S pm daily. Free.

(Photo caption: Jimmy ... I had nothing else to do but paint)"

=Straits Times article, 24 August 1990=



Editable text of the article:

The Outsider

Growing up in Chinatown without really knowing his parents, Jimmy Ong was destined to be an outsider all his life. And he is certainly not an easy subject to talk to, as T. Sasitharan found out in a midnight interview over glasses of vodka. "Why do you take art so seriously?" he challenged the reporter. See full story and review of his works on Page Four.

=Straits Times article, 16 May 2011=



Editable text of the article:

THE STRAITS TIMES MONDAY, MAY 16 2011 PAGE 64

Drawing has helped US-based artist Jimmy Ong come to terms with being abandoned by his parents

Adeline Chia

Over his 20-year career, Singapore artist Jimmy Ong has made a name for himself doing expressive charcoal drawings of nude figures. The robust, muscular bodies are often twisted and contorted, and sometimes it is hard to tell if they are wrestling, dancing or caught in an awkward embrace.

Then there are the strange family portraits. A pregnant man holds his distended belly and stares at the viewer. Ong has a famous self-portrait where the artist is imagined as both father and son. In My Master My Son, a woman lifts a smaller man effortlessly with one arm and he melts into her.

Ambiguous human relationships are at the heart of Ong’s works, tor a long time, he was obsessed with the idea of progeny and ancestors. Asked why, he says it was something that he was preoccupied with as a young man, just “a phase”.

Those looking for biographical clues to his art may look to his past for answers. His parents separated when he was about three and left him and his younger brother in the care of his paternal grandfathers.

His father and mother subsequently re-married and started new families and rarely saw Ong and his brother.

On the rare occasions that they visited, he hid behind the curtain and stared shyly at the strangers. He says: “It was a painful thing. We were told not to get too close. I was very sensitive about it.”

He was not always comfortable discussing his family background. In interviews in the 1990s, he was abrasive and confrontational when the topic was broached.

But time has mellowed him. His art has been a form of therapy. Now 47, a resident in Vermont, a leafy suburb outside New York, and a well-known artist, he has come a long way from the grimy, crowded Chinatown shophouse where he spent his childhood.

His charcoal-on-paper sell for at least $20,000 a pop and institutions such as the National Art Gallery collect his works.

Last year, his three watercolours of Minister Mentor Lee Kuan Yew, with the words Papa can you hear me? scrawled on them, caused ripples in a politically themed exhibition titled Beyond LKY at Valentine Willie Fine Art.

But he dismisses the suggestion that he makes a good living as an artist. “I create about 10 works a year. I sell three, gallery takes half. Is that a good living?” Going by his monkish, zen attitude, it does not seem like he cares very much about money.

He lives the life of a “Stepford wife” now. His partner is a retired lawyer and the artist keeps house, does the laundry and cooks. As for his art, he draws in the garage in the afternoon.

Drawing, for him, is about “deleting” and getting rid of the ones that are not good enough. He is not like those artists who “flood the market” with tens and hundreds of works.

His long-time friend and dealer, Valentine Willie, says Ong’s works are significant because he was the first artist in South-east Asia to use charcoal-on-paper, “not as preparatory sketches but the final product”.

Ong was also one of the first Singapore artists to put his homosexuality at the centre of his practice, Willie says, adding: “His early works said, ‘I’m afraid, I'm ashamed’. Maybe he was even courting trouble. He is a very honest artist.”

There is honesty aplenty - and sly wit, too, delivered in a baritone voice - during the three-hour interview with Life!.

From robust and expressive charcoal-on-paper drawings, Jimmy Ong has now turned to calm, playful and colourful oil paintings. ST PHOTO: RAJ NADARAJAN

Dealing with past hurts

We are in a cafe below the Private Museum in Waterloo Street, where his latest exhibition of paintings is held, and the artist is dressed simply in a dark blue shirt, slacks and trekking shoes.

His childhood in a Hokkien Street shophouse was “colourful”.

He recalls: “My grandparents had nine children and they had an average of 4.5 children each. So the house was like a nursery where the kids got dropped off. I had a lot of cousins to play with.”

His grandfather, who died of consumption in 1980, managed a team of labourers who loaded and unloaded goods at the Singapore River. He remembers his grandmother, who is 94 this year, cooking buckets of porridge, vegetables, peanuts and fish for them.

He was a clever child with a talent for drawing, which he used for cute, mercenary ends. He took part in children's art competitions for the prizes. His biggest win was a $500 cash prize which he blew on a Seiko watch and the biggest disappointment was a huge trophy that he could not take home on the bus.

He was a carefree boy who was left to his own devices. Still, he was acutely aware of the parent-shaped hole in his life.

To this day, the facts are hazy to Ong as to why his parents could not have split the custody of their children.

His brother, now 46, is a mathematics teacher in the United States. This original betrayal would haunt his works later, with their emphasis on warped family ties.*

During his “angry young man” phase, he did portraits of himself pregnant, as well as other ambiguous works such as His Father's Grandson (1997), where a squatting boy peers between the legs of a standing couple in an embrace.

He studied at Gan Eng Seng Secondary School and Catholic Junior College but it was in the army, where he was a clerk, that he got to know an artistic crowd, including theatre director Ivan Heng, playwright-painter Desmond Sim and celebrity photographer Russel Wong.

After that, he was determined to be an artist and to go abroad. He landed a scholarship from the Center for Creative Studies, a small art school in Detroit, and went there for a year.

He continued his art education wherever he could get scholarships - in Studio Art Center International in Florence, Italy and then at the Pennsylvania Academy Of Fine Arts in Philadelphia.

There, he learnt classical composition and structure - “the basis of good art, basically”.

In 1990, he had his first solo show at the Goethe Institute in Singapore, which caused a stir for its graphic depictions of human sexuality and social misfits.

“It was a coming-of-age period. I was becoming aware of my sexuality. I was attracted to outcasts because it was romantic to me at that time,” he says.

The motif of tangled, messy human relationships returned in his 1997 show, Lovers And Ancestors. Pas De Deux shows a man pulling a woman by the hair and kissing her, while another woman looks on from behind. In Chinese Son, a pregnant woman sits in the foreground flipping a picture book. In the background, a man is lying down with his hand on his forehead, thinking.

Why the obsession with human bodies and their interactions? He says it is down to his Western art education, which is centred on the human figure.

His formative years were influenced by the great Renaissance masters such as Piero della Francesca, Rembrandt and Francisco Goya.

“Using the body to express psychological concepts and relationships was very popular in art in the 1980s and 1990s. Artists such as Lucien Freud did that,” he says, referring to the famous British portrait artist.

He thinks that Asians feel uneasy aboutthe human form, in art and in life. “It’s almost the same discomfort my grandfather had around any display; of affection. He would never hug me or praise me.”

Actress Neo Swee Lin, 48, a long-time friend, used to pose nude for him. She was the “Winni” in some of his early charcoal drawings, such as in the portrait Winni - Woman In Blue Jeans, where she is lying down “like a mermaid”.

Ivan Heng, 48, who also posed for him, says watching Ong draw was a memorable experience. “He draws with his whole body. He dances. His forearms, and elbows will be,covered with charcoal.

“It is intensely physical, sensuous and spiritual. His works are made with his whole being. And you can see it on the canvas,” says the theatre director.

To Ong, art was a form of therapy. “In the early stages, drawing was the same as keeping a journal. It was an outpouring after your feelings have been contained for so long. It provides you with a diagnosis, but not necessarily a cure.”

Time has been a great healer and he says he has forgiven his parents, although he does not know the exact circumstances of why they abandoned him, adding: “I can only speculate. But I really don’t know and there's nothing to begrudge.” His father died in 2004 and he was informed by an aunt. He performed the rites as the eldest son in the Taoist funeral. “Only his third wife was there,” he says.

As for his mother, he has seen her only three times in his life. He last met her when he was 43. She had been newly widowed and had asked for a meeting. “Over a cup of coffee at a fast-food

Jimmy Ong as a kindergarten pupil (right) in Chong Hock Girls School in 1970, at St Patrick Art Centre sculpture workshop In 1984 (below) and his Self Portrait As Father & Son (1990, left).

‘I was self-aware that I missed the idea of a father. It was something I adopted. For example, you become aware that you are too fat and you want to lose weight. So at that time, I felt the absence of a father acutely'

On his earlier obsession with the idea of progeny in his works.

Last year, his watercolours of Minister Mentor Lee Kuan Yew. with the words Papa can you hear me? (right) scrawled on them, caused ripples In an exhibition titled Beyond LKY. Ong's works, such as this charcoal drawing, Kong Thung & Guni (above), are often ambiguous and it is hard to see If the characters are struggling or in a dance.

PHOTO: VALENTINE WILLIE FINE ART

'The wonderful thing about drawings is that they can contain an idea. They don't nave to be very realistic. It's a very handy medium. The Chinese call it xie yi or "writing an idea".

A drawing is like a cartoon

On why he likes to draw

'When I started out In the 1980s, all the young artists you can count on one hand. Now, everybody’s an artist. I didn’t think of art as a career, more as an elective

On changes in the art scene

joint, she gave a whole barrage of explanations why it was not her fault she left. At the end of the meeting, I decided for both of us that it would be the last time we see each other.”

Now, he returns to Singapore about three or four times a year to visit his friends and his grandmother, and for exhibitions.

He and his partner keep four coon-hounds, a type of hunting dog. “They are my descendants,” he says with a laugh.

Singapore is still on his mind, though.

At last year’s Singapore Tyler Print Institute show, he created vibrant, colourful paintings of Singapore’s iconic buildings such as the port and explored Singaporeans’ thirst for wealth and economic progress.

This move into colour continues with his oil paintings in the latest show at the Private Museum, superimposing his adult friends’ faces onto thd bodies of children.

There is a calmness and playfulness to these works. A real-life couple are depicted as siblings, with the girl clasping a ribbon and the boy holding a panda bear.

In another work, a pair of real-life sisters, whose parents had wished they were boys, are transformed into the preferred gender.

The works are inspired by his hours of solitude in New England museums, admiring the amateur colonial paintings done in the early 1800s.

He says painting is a slower, more contemplative medium and a return to what he was taught in school. Fifteen years of expressing himself through charcoal have taken their toll.

He says: “A lot of my drawings hark back to Chinese art, where the brushstrokes are very important. I wanted to be virtuoso. But the brushstrokes became obsessive.”

No matter what, creating art is still the first thing on his mind. Near the end of the interview, he shows his iPhone and the various photographs and videos of his inspirations.

A beautiful pregnant woman standing under a tree. An advertisement with an Air Asia stewardess crouching in a tight uniform. A video of Confucius rites from a TV screen.

“It’s a form of taking notes and only the note-taker would know what the pictures are about,” he says.

“But you know, a picture is worth a hundred, a thousand, a million words.”

If he lets himself, he worries about the future. “What happens if I get sick and hospitalised? This trip back to Singapore, I keep forgetting things. What if I get Alzheimer's?

“If I'm old and infirm, i’ll be reliant on a nurse to wipe my ass. Maybe I'll be abused. I have this anxiety.”

Then the monkish side takes over again.

He says: "But you just become aware that you can be worried about everything. You can worry about how you look, about not having enough money, about your partner not loving you enough.

“So you just let it go, lah."

chiahta@sph.com.sg

TRANSFIGURING

Where: The Private Museum

When: Until May 27,10am to 6pm (Mon to Fri).

11am to 5pm (weekend)

Admission; free

=Career=

Since graduating from the Pennsylvania Academy of Fine Arts in Philadelphia, USA in 1992, Ong has exhibited in numerous local and international exhibitions including Gallery 456 in New York (USA), National Art Gallery in Kuala Lumpur (Malaysia), Newhouse Center of Contemporary Art, Staten Island, New York (USA), Asian Civilisation Museum (Singapore), Plum Blossoms Gallery in Hong Kong and New York (USA), Lunguganga, Bentota (Sri Lanka) and Tyler Rollins Fine Art, New York (USA).

Ong’s works are in the permanent collections of the National University Of Singapore Museum and the National Gallery Singapore, Deutsche Bank AG, amongst other private and corporate collections.

He is noted for his large-scale, figurative charcoal works on paper since his first solo exhibitions in the 1980s. His early, pioneering work focused on sexual identity and gender roles, often within the context of the traditional Chinese family. Ong has, over the past twenty-five years, explored the ways in which multiple identities and perspectives – whether sexual, ethnic, national, or even generational – can coexist within the individual. His deeply personal works have taken inspiration from a stark analysis of his own experience, and indeed of his own physical form, an ongoing process of what he calls “creative self therapy.” In recent years, he has investigated issues relating to marital roles, informed in part by his experience as a spouse in a gay marriage. His inquiry has gradually broadened from the personal to the plural and has incorporated gender archetypes as conveyed through mythology and spiritual traditions. His seminal exhibition, Sitayana, exhibited at Tyler Rollins Fine Art in 2010 and subsequently acquired by the National Art Gallery of Singapore, marked the first major public exhibition of this new focus, with its feminist re-imagining of the ancient Indian epic, the Ramayana, a work which continues to play a vibrant role throughout Southeast Asia, acting as an endless source of inspiration for the region’s folk and popular cultures. Ong used the Ramayana as a point of departure in creating new narratives that were informed by his sensitivity to the way gender roles play out in contemporary relationships. Recent exhibitions include: an important collection of 100 newly acquired works from the 1980s at the National University of Singapore Museum (2013-14); an exhibition at the Private Museum, Singapore (2011); and an acclaimed solo show of new works, entitled SGD, at the Singapore Tyler Print Institute following his residency there (2010).

In 2012, Ong’s investigation of the contemporary resonance of ancient myths led him to a series of projects in Yogyakarta, one of the major artistic centers in Java, Indonesia, where he began documentary research into gender roles as reflected in folklore as well as contemporary society, the latter specifically relating to the local transgender community. Sections from these projects were presented as part of the parallel programs of the Biennale Jogja XII in Yogyakarta (2013). His most recent exhibition at Tyler Rollins Fine Art, Elo Progo (2013), took its name and inspiration from the confluence of the Elo and Progo rivers – one said to be male, the other female – located in the Kedu Plain near Borobudur, the world’s largest Buddhist temple and one of Java’s most sacred ancient sites. Ong was captivated by this local myth as well as the traditional Javanese practice of meditation in water. The Elo Progo exhibition centered on Ong’s first public showing of video works, which were inspired by the rituals of water meditation and informed by themes of gender fluidity and mythic transformation. The exhibition also included a new body of works on paper, done in richly colored gouache, that appropriated a type of Chinese splash ink brushwork in mirrored patterns created by the repetitive folding of the paper along an axis. Through a circular and meditative process of drawing, transferring, and redrawing, which echoed the cyclical, ritualistic time of the videos, Ong created a vivid series of works that featured a recurring, androgynous figure. In various degrees of abstraction, the figure was shown twice in each work, in a mirroring of form reflecting Ong’s ongoing interest in ideas relating to duality, gender binarism, and the fluidity and transformation of identity.

In 2019, a constellation of Ong's earlier sketches, drawings, paintings, photographs and personal effects were exhibited at the NUS Museum's prep-room project entitled Visual Notes: Actions and Imaginings which opened to the public on 23 July 2019 at the NX2 Gallery. An excerpt of the NUS Museum's interview with him was posted on Facebook,:

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=See also=
 * Tan Peng
 * Singapore LGBT artists

=References=
 * http://www.trfineart.com/artist/jimmy-ong/#artist-works
 * https://www.artandmarket.net/dialogues/2019/9/22/conversation-with-singapore-artist-jimmy-ong
 * https://seafocus.sg/artists/jimmy-ong/
 * https://www.fostgallery.com/jimmy-ong/cv
 * https://www.nationalgallery.sg/magazine/out-of-isolation-covid-19-jimmy-ong-johann-yamin-uncursing-cotton

=Acknowledgements=

This article was written by Roy Tan.