Artereal Gallery is excited to announce that we are now representing Ben Ali Ong. Ben Ali Ong is a Sydney based artist working predominantly across photography, video and mixed media. Choosing to work solely in black and white, his brooding photographs are defined by their use of dream-like imagery and explore recurring universal themes – life and death, the poetics of every-day existence, the pain and suffering of the human condition contrasted with the beauty and mystery of the urban environment and the natural world.
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Often blurry, grainy and scratched – Ong’s pictorial choices appear to be made completely at random, creating a disjointed and surreal narrative… Preferring the artworks to speak for themselves, Ong presents them in a manner that allows the viewer to construct their own meanings and interpretations, in order to achieve a state of self-reflection. This idea is concurrent throughout all of Ong’s works and is inspired by Surrealist film and writing. The notion of the artwork being an open-ended fragment with multiple arrangements as well as the potential to convey a subconscious, or spiritual source.
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The inherent allure of Ben Ali Ong’s practice stems from the psychological pull which draws the viewer into each work. Ong’s work has an underlying sense of anguish and sorrow (perhaps even horror) which clings to these black and white photographs. The shadowy, brooding drama and chiaroscuro of the artist’s work captures the delicate interplay between lightness and darkness in a way which acts as a visual metaphor for the vagaries of human existence; alluding to the idea that the beauty and fragility of life are inseparable from the horror and sorrow which accompany it. The resulting emotional pull resonates with and touches some deep inner core which resides within all humanity, transporting us away from our everyday existence. In this way, Ong’s photographs and video works, which are at once both beautiful and frightening, achieve a timeless, unknown, almost half forgotten quality or existence which touches upon ideas of life, death and morality.Ben is currently showing work as part of
Decisive Moments, a photography exhibition at Contact Sheet gallery – as reviewed in the
Sydney Morning Herald and the Mosman Daily…
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