“I looked at Alvin Ong’s images many times, and many times fell asleep with them open on my laptop. Something about the casual softness and violence of these semi-corporeal shapes effortlessly entered my dreams, became my perverse windfall friends. I felt responsible for these ‘rough materials,’ these leftover slices of vision, and I wanted to make a diaristic dream-poem simply to record this self-constructed contract between me and a stranger’s abandoned artworks. So, my process is about documenting and creating value for something fleeting (an encounter with an unknown artist) and something useless (incomplete and perhaps never-to-be-completed creations). It’s about relocating the quotidian, the transient, and the easily overlooked to a buoyant zone where readers might find lightness. The attempt is less about ‘completion’ than transformation, an intuitive and personal re-making without necessarily finishing.”

 

 

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Ink, 24 x 32 cm

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

sleep company

 

night, around my silvergrey aluminum bed framed by four white neon lights, james ensor esque faces float up and down the pvc strip curtains, james ensor esque as in they look plucked out of uncanny mannequins – and yet, something deteriorating, something real about these blurred faces, writ in ink, made flesh under the moon, now troubling, now harmless, they curve in and out of my bourgeois picturesque plants, alien, made-up, melting, calm, buoyant faces keep me company

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

my community of mellow ghosts, over the decades, though they keep me awake sometimes, we’ve learned to lie together in vexed peace, milk-soft shadows spread atop my chest, pulse between my legs, sneak under my spine, shimmy round my fingers, slide down my cleavage, somersault up my waist, when finally asleep they entwine with the hair on my head, the hair on my floor, in the kind, safe, tender breaths of these vaporous bodies, i’ve wanted not to wake up

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

i carry gratitude for these faceless faces, crumpled, fragmented, other-experienced flesh, they come and go with the wind, salt wind from the north coasts, paternal hometown, i know that scent, slipping through the slits on my antique doors, dreaming, breathing bodies, ever spilling, blending, commingling, fragile yet persistent reveries, unlike humans at the gallery where i work, these beings are always present, even dramatic in their muted drift, no need for audiences, no need for names, when happy they play around the room, when tired they sleep all over my designer furniture, when bored they go elsewhere, perhaps the apartment next door, these faces aren’t mine, i wish they were mine, i wish they were me, something honest and courageous about the overgrown brows, cleft lips, shattered jawlines

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

inevitable malevolent presences infiltrate, near-solid busts, they don’t flow but stare down from high places, wielding the fixed gaze of teacherly fathers, i curl, chant for them to depart, vulgar variations of hurry up please it’s time, long susurrating nights, a swarm of benign faces, like angels, swoop down on my delicate desolate artbed, rest their skewed chins on my own liquefying face, in neon glow, ghosts of my fathers begin to fade, moonrise, blended bodies dissolve into fugitive possibilities of gentler presences

 

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