The Conditional

Opal Mae Ong

New York 28 oct 2021

Being born I looked around and the world and its people terrified me. 

I was attracted by capacities for care, but everything connected with cruelty had a dark power over me. 

I was early taken to sweeping things under the rug because who wouldn’t, whose bodies and whose spirits wouldn’t go along? 

Also I remember that below the surface was a constant wait scorching me. Refusal is an enigma. 

I decided to draw upon quiet propositions: ghosts, gravity, grief, my meanness— such as Siane Ngai had done analytically in Ugly Feelings. 

In the early days I was looking to be “one” but found emotional severences and the shells of inherited lifetimes. 

I have since found triggers nonsensical and yet real, it’s in the air, at the post office, in other people’s family photos and home. 

I drew upon an irreducible desire to accept there will be no resolve. I want to say something about love, or actually love in progress. 

I painted her knot by knot mothering again and again and again

-Inspired by A Statement by Alice Neel

Les œuvres

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Arsenal Contemporary Art New York is pleased to present The Conditional, an online solo exhibition by Opal Mae Ong, held in conjunction with Hunter College’s MFA Thesis exhibition, It Lives*. Comprised of new paintings and an audio recording by the New York based artist, The Conditional weaves together memories, dreams, and moments from Ong’s past, and renders them into reality. While Ong’s practice is decidedly not a cathartic gesture, she touches on topics of grief, longing, and trauma, using these subjects as a departure point for exploration.

As memories and dreams are intrinsically subjective, Ong works intuitively, recalling haunting memories as a starting point for her compositions. Through a painting practice that channels a constructive memory process, she explores these experiences and pieces them together into visual representations. Interrogating the notion that memory is intangible, the paintings in The Conditional seek to reconstruct incomplete recollections, as they arrive in the present, allowing instances of revival, constructive encoding, and evaluation to organically unfurl over time. 

Recurring imagery is scattered throughout Ong’s paintings, alluding to an acutely developed visual language. Ghostly hands and obstructed faces are motifs across this body of work, creating a dreamlike deja vu for the viewer that is akin to surrealism. Ong’s depicted characters do not confront the viewer or themselves either facing away or shielding their face. The viewer becomes a voyeur, peering into these intimate moments that have been derived from Ong’s personal experiences, forming a tension between the private nature of memory and the audience’s natural inclination to decipher.

*It Lives is on view at Hunter College MFA Gallery (205 Hudson Street) through Nov 8, 2021. 

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