Born in Singapore in 1964, Jimmy Ong won the 1980 UOB Painting of the Year Competition (Youth 2nd Prize), and during the mid-1980s to early-1990s received scholarships to study in the USA and in Italy. Accomplished in sculpture and painting, Ong’s trademark are his expressive charcoal drawings.The diptych ‘January December Skin’ pays tribute to Goya’s ‘Saturn Devouring One of His Sons’, and is from Ong’s seminal ‘Prodigal Son’ series from the late 1980s and ‘90s. The drawings in this series show a new maturity in Ong’s development as an artist, with their raw and passionate execution and subject, dark and brooding, and intense and complex in their heavy charcoal lines. They are expressions of Ong’s explorations of intimacy and sexuality, and of conflicting notions of filial obligations. Furthermore, the artist sees himself reflected in both the male and female figures of these works.
