Opal Mae Ong is a Filipino-American artist living and working on Lenapehoking in Brooklyn, New York. Their current body of work is informed by folklore, transient flora and fauna, embodied histories, and the ways these ideas constellate to shape both inner and outer worlds. Rooted in a felt response to the natural world and an innate reverence for the otherworldly, Ong’s practice moves between memory, myth, and somatic attention.
Their paintings and drawings draw from lost ancestral knowledge and speculative visions, resulting in a personal myth-making. The work conjures feminine figures who crawl toward horizons, commune with flora, carry moons, shapeshift, or collapse from unrest.
Ong’s palette evokes liminal times of day such as dawn, dusk, and night. In these in-between hours, the figures are suspended in states of poiesis. They move with a blind sense of trust through processions of landscapes, architectural boundaries, and borders they somehow persist through, weathering the terrain of each day.
Over the course of several weeks, Ong constructs, deconstructs, and reconstructs their paintings in an intuitive, materially driven, and reference-filled process. This ongoing cycle of making, unmaking, and remaking becomes a way to fulfill impractical desire, grieve familial losses, and work through collective forces. For Ong, their daily studio practice becomes a portal for deep material engagement with ever-shifting bardos. In Tibetan Buddhist teachings, bardos are porous states where life, death, dreams, and awakenings coexist, and where transformation becomes possible.
