Alvin Ong’s In My Head featured on Artnet

2 Jan 2022

Yavuz Gallery’s presentation of Alvin Ong’s In My Head is featured as a ‘High of 2021’ by Artnet.

In My Head was a solo presentation at The Armory Show, New York in September 2021. Consisting of 108 self-portraits, it was a monumental and immersive installation reflecting the artist’s ongoing interests in the physicality of the body, as well as how our human experiences, both online and offline, are being reshaped in the current moment.

Through vignettes of everyday life, the vocabulary of the mundane is transformed into a site of spectacle, a cabinet of curiosities in which audiences are implicated as flaneur and voyeur. Individually isolated against surreal hues evoking both natural and artificial light, each portrait is painted from memory, evoking both the artist’s lived experience as well as the artist’s fertile imagination. The body is presented as a site of metamorphosis: glitchy, isolated, intersecting, merging and colliding across different planes. Oscillating between restlessness and desire, they capture the ephemerality of a collective psyche, isolated and estranged in our own skins, moving endlessly between online avatars, filtered profile images, apps, chats, and real-life interaction.

Image: Yavuz Gallery at the 2021 Armory Show held at the Javits Center in New York. Courtesy of Yavuz Gallery.