[Post-Script] The Body, An Ocean: Revisiting the Jimmy Ong Archives

About the series

Post-Script, a moving image and conversation series, invites audiences to think of the archive as a living, shifting space. Across three sessions, it extends the inquires seeded in the ongoing exhibition, Radio Malaya: abridged conversations about art and associated prep-room projects.

The prep-room is a space for experimentation where ideas are tested, archives are revisited, and exhibition-making becomes an open, process-driven dialogue. Many of these projects now find renewed life in the Radio Malaya permanent exhibition, where traces of their research continue to resonate beyond their conclusions.

Post-Script returns to these projects in a new form, using the moving image as a medium to revisit and reframe their themes. Each session is co-programmed with past prep-room collaborators, engaging with the central concerns of the original research—from the fluidity of identity and the movement of bodies across borders, to feminist re-readings of the archive, to the remixing and re-contextualisation of cultural memory.

Installation view, prep-room: Visual Notes: Actions and Imaginings, NUS Museum, 2020.

Prelude

In Visual Notes: Actions and Imaginings (2019-2022), prep-room collaborator Johann Yamin closely examines the work of modern and contemporary artist Jimmy Ong, whose practice interrogates the fluidity of gender, persona, and identity. Archival materials from Ong are currently situated in Radio Malaya: abridged conversations about art in the form of photographs – Shoebox series (Excerpt). It offers a glimpse into the artist’s life during the 1980s and 1990s, and is nestled amongst traces of performance art pieces such as Amanda Heng’s Let’s Chat (1996 - Present) and Jose Tence Ruiz’s Without It, I Am Invisible (1993). In this section of the exhibition, intimate memories are made public through physical and photographic documentation. The body is a site of exploration, and the viewer, its explorer.

Installation view, Radio Malaya: abridged conversations about art, NUS Museum, 2024.

Featured: Jimmy Ong, Shoebox series (Excerpt), c.1983 - 1988; Photographs, various sizes.

Content Advisory Warning: This session features moving images with nudity and potentially sensitive images. Visitor discretion is advised.

The Body, An Ocean

In this spirit, the first Post-Script session titled The Body, An Ocean navigates the intersections of identity, migration, and embodiment, further exploring key threads in Jimmy Ong’s artistic practice. The selected works more broadly contend with the movement of bodies in relation to political and spatial constraints, considering abstraction as a tactic for both sharing and obscuring knowledge. Here, fluidity is explored through the body in multiple forms: the choreography of the human body, the artist’s evolving body of work, and flows of migration across the body of water between Singapore and Indonesia, where Ong’s practice has been based.

These themes unfold through video art and moving images, Umbilical (2012) and Melas (2012) by Jimmy Ong, Lazarus (2023) by Kang Seung Lee and B.A.T.A.M (Bila Anda Tiba Anda Menyesal) - When You Arrive You’ll Regret (2020) by Tita Salina and Irwan Ahmett, drawing connections between personal identity and geographic, political, and spatial borders.

Find out more about the series here.

Lookout for Session 2: after After Ballads: Errant Footnotes (1 October) and Session 3: Jemput…Tengok: Revisiting Yang Tidak Lupa (22 October).

About the Speakers

Johann Yamin’s (he/they) current research and writing focus on digital cultures from the contexts of Singapore and its broader region of Southeast Asia, with an emphasis on the materiality of communication infrastructures and their entanglements with colonial histories. He holds an MA in Media Studies from The New School, New York with a graduate minor in Transmedia & Digital Storytelling, and a BSocSci in Communications and New Media from the National University of Singapore with undergraduate minors in Art History and Film Production.

As an art worker, he was a 2020 Rapid Response for a Better Digital Future Fellow at Eyebeam for co-organising the online project Pulau Something, a Curatorial & Research Resident at the Singapore Art Museum in 2021, and the recipient of a Rhizome Microgrant in 2023. Johann was a Curatorial Intern with NUS Museum in 2017-2018, and a part-time Curatorial Assistant in 2019-2020.

Jimmy Ong (b. 1964, Singapore) graduated from the Pennsylvania Academy of Fine Arts in Philadelphia, USA in 1992, and is regarded as one of the pre-eminent artists of his generation.

Since the 1980s, Ong has been recognised for his monumental figurative charcoal works on paper. His drawings often focus on traditional Confucian philosophical themes like filial piety, ancestral worship, his own complex familial relationships and struggles with accepted gender identities and roles (Chinatown Suite, c.1980-1990). In recent years, he has started to explore historical political figures and events, focusing on the colonial history in Southeast Asia (Sitayana, 2010). He has exhibited extensively locally and internationally. His artworks are in the permanent collections of NUS Museum and the National Gallery Singapore, Deutsche Bank AG, amongst other private and corporate collections.

Ong currently works between Yogyakarta and Singapore.pre