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.‘Master’s Voice’ is from Ong’s seminal ‘Prodigal Son’ series, which was successively produced by the artist throughout the late 1980s and 1990s. 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. The images are not drawn from posed models, but rather extracted from his imagination, symbolic manifestations of what is taking place in the artist’s psyche.
