Onlie Ong

INFO

Name	Onlie Ong (he/him)
Born	1948
Country of Birth	Taiwan
Place of Residence	Tāmaki Makaurau Auckland
Ethnicities	Taiwanese
Artform	Craft/Object, Visual arts
Decades Active	1990s, 2000s, 2010s, 2020s

ABOUT

Onlie Ong is a multidisciplinary artist based in Tāmaki Makaurau. He grew up in Taiwan, where he studied graphic design and practised calligraphy and wood carving. For several years, he worked in the advertising team at Panasonic Taipei as a graphic designer. After leaving this role, he ran an independent publishing company for art and design books and then went on to pursue postgraduate studies in art history at the Academy of Arts in Taipei.

Ong arrived in Aotearoa in 1991, moving to Pōneke with his wife and two daughters, where he began learning about ceramic sculpture in evening classes at Onslow College. He made practical ceramics such as bowls and plates but also created sculptural forms that were modelled after farm animals and food. Ong dedicated a whole series to banana sculptures, each one more distorted, moving away from its original form in some way or another: one banana wrapped in bandages, another partially peeled open only to reveal another yellow unpeeled banana. Ong chose the banana because of its connotations as a slur that refers to people of East Asian descent. In this series, each banana is warped, moving the symbol further and further from the insult. He exhibited his ceramics throughout Aotearoa and Asia for several years.

In 2008, Ong suffered a wrist injury that made it hard for him to continue working with ceramics. Instead of forgoing his practice, he pivoted and took up painting, which he has focused on ever since. Since the first year he began painting he has kept a detailed archive of his work, capturing photos of each painting he creates and filing them in folders, which he keeps at his home studio.

Ong takes inspiration from the landscape that surrounds his home in Flat Bush, Tāmaki Makaurau, and often uses the imagery of his environment in his paintings with a dream-like twist. Clouds are used as a stand-in for other objects, such as a sheep coming out of a barn, smoke plumes from a chimney, or even a piece of clothing hanging from a washing line. In each of his paintings, he includes an element of the uncanny or unreal, which separates them from traditional landscape or observational paintings. His paintings connect the aesthetics and themes of surrealism with the Chinese landscape practice of shan shui. Ong’s practice balances Eastern and Western influences and as he explains, “no matter the form, the messaging is the same”, in that he uses his creative practice to articulate his migrant experience.