Sylvia Ong

ABOUT THE ARTIST
Sylvia Ong’s practice is rooted in lyrical abstraction, shaped by her background in cinematography, photography, and sound. Her work explores the inner landscape as a fluid and responsive space, informed by memory, movement, and lived experience rather than fixed emotional states. Drawing on moments of transit and observation, Ong approaches painting as a way of navigating shifting atmospheres, where tone, rhythm, and intensity evolve organically. Sound plays a central role in her process, with each work emerging through a synesthetic interplay of listening, memory, and sensation, guiding how marks appear, dissolve, and reform across the surface.

Working primarily with oil and oil bar, Ong’s process is intuitive and meditative, grounded in layering, scraping, and rebuilding to achieve depth, transparency, and luminosity. Her compositions balance improvisation and structure, translating fleeting impressions into immersive visual fields that hold a sense of quiet passage rather than resolution. Through this approach, her paintings become spaces of contemplation, reflecting her sensitivity to natural rhythms and her interest in capturing the emotional truth of a moment as it unfolds.

IN THE ARTIST’S WORDS
After Returning
150cm x 150cm

Sylvia Ong reflects on the making of After Returning, one of the most challenging works in the series, and how the experience reaffirmed the importance of intuition and trust in her creative process.

“After Returning was probably the most challenging work I created in this series. At first, I tried to force it into a specific emotional space, but the painting resisted that approach. Nothing felt natural, and I realised I wasn’t responding to what was actually happening on the surface. The turning point came when I stepped away from the studio and spent time in nature. When I returned, I stopped trying to control the outcome and allowed the painting to develop more intuitively. The work shifted quite quickly after that. From that point on, I realised the painting wasn’t about illustrating a fixed emotion, but about staying with what is real in the moment of making. That experience gave the work emotional clarity and also deepened the direction of the entire series. It became a return to trust and both in the process and in myself as a painter. I was also reminded of my first workshop at the Arts Club, where I shared with participants that anyone can be a painter if they learn to listen, trust emotion, and translate it through colour. In a way, that workshop became a mirror for my own practice again, a reminder to keep returning to that same openness each time I work.”