Opal Mae Ong (she/they) is a Filipino-American artist living and working on Lenapehoking in Brooklyn, New York. Their practice emerges from a reverence for both the earthly and the otherworldly, exploring how mythology, plants, and ancestral knowledge offer ways of orienting ourselves within a world that often exceeds empirical understanding.
Working across painting and drawing, Ong creates speculative cosmologies rooted in the fractures and continuities of lineage, migration, and memory. Informed by ancestral ties to the Philippines, China, and the broader histories of diaspora and colonial encounter, their work understands mythology not as inherited narrative but as an evolving way of making meaning. Rather than recovering a singular cultural past, Ong builds personal mythologies that hold together what history, migration, and loss have rendered incomplete, imagining relationships between bodies, landscapes, ancestors, and unseen forces that resist fixed boundaries.
Working with acrylic and gouache on canvas and compressed graphite on paper, Ong constructs, deconstructs, and reconstructs each work over several weeks, allowing intuitive and methodical processes to unfold together. Figures emerge through this process rather than from predetermined narratives: they shapeshift, commune with flora, carry celestial bodies, and perform impossible gestures as ordinary acts. The landscape is never a backdrop but an active participant, carrying memory, transformation, and spiritual presence alongside the figures it holds.
In an increasingly urbanized and secular society, Ong asks what forms of knowledge remain available when experience exceeds what can be measured or verified. Their paintings are not escapes from reality, but invitations to inhabit multiple realities at once, where intuition, ancestry, ecology, and the unseen remain active ways of understanding the world.
For Ong, painting and drawing are technologies for cosmological inquiry: sites where grief can coexist with wonder, where diasporic inheritance can enter new relationships, and where human and more-than-human worlds can be continually reimagined.
