Jimmy Ong

Jimmy Ong depicts South East Asia’s multilayered societies, capturing their colonial history and nuanced post-colonial contemporaneity. In doing so, he incorporates their surrounding philosophical traditions, spiritual values, and regional myths, situating them in proximity to queer and feminist subjectivities and practices. Buddhist introspection and transformation are present motifs in Ong’s practice, as well as Confucianist values of self-cultivation and social responsibility. Many of his works deal with the impact of national identification with the British colonialist Thomas Stamford Raffles, who is simultaneously revered as a founding figure in Singapore and associated with criminality and violence in Indonesia. The corporeal, padded effigies from the Seamstress Raffles series, which can be seen here, reflect this cognitive dissonance. They depict a dismembered Raffles—a reference to the punishment meted out to Javanese traitors by sultans prior—while the posture is also reminiscent of the heroic pose of the Raffles statue in Singapore. Given the entanglement of the local textile industries in this colonial history, the effigies were made initially in collaboration with seamstresses from Yogyakarta. With the recognizable traditional batik technique of cloth painting and over-stitching, the figures are embroidered with epitaphs—proverbs from a section concerning ‘The Ethics of the Javans’ in Raffles’s 1817 book History of Java. The seamstresses carefully provide what can be read as an act of torment, but one that facilitates the kind of atonement necessary for such violence. Ong’s installation unfolds during a contemporary moment in which the statues of historical interlopers are being pulled down off their pedestals. Via shibari bondage and body suspension, the proxy bodies in question enable a playful but transcendental collective processing of submission and domination.

Works in the exhibition: Jimmy Ong and Nyai Penjahit, with shibari by Daniel Kok, Seamstress Raffles (Indigo Juko) (2018), cotton cloth and dacron with purple shibari ropes, 80 × 50 × 30 cm; Jimmy Ong and Nyai Penjahit, with shibari by Daniel Kok, Seamstress Raffles (Florent) (2016), cotton cloth, dacron, and Ikea stand, 90 × 50 × 30 cm; Jimmy Ong and Nyai Penjahit, with shibari by Daniel Kok, Seamstress Raffles (Purple) (2017), cotton cloth, dacron, and Ikea stand, 90 × 50 × 30 cm. Courtesy of FOST Gallery, Singapore