Ashen Words On Water

22 August – 26 September 2026

A solo exhibition by Ong Chia Koon

Exploring gesture and the infinite properties of ink, Ong Chia Koon has developed a fascinating contemporary practice rooted in popular textual references, song lyrics, poems, and television series.

While music resonates, the ashen complexities of the world sediment onto paper through the fluid movement of the brush. For the sheer joy of the eyes.

Excerpts

Action words of water

Words are of great importance to Chia Koon. Their form, of course, but also their meaning, interwoven with their rhythm and their own particular colour. If ink itself is his medium, it remains closely connected to the highly codified art of calligraphy. A teacher and accomplished technician, he masters its various styles, knows their history and centuries-old traditions, can imitate even the hesitations of a child faltering through exercises, and move from one form to another according to his impulses. […]

Text, turned into material, gives rise to a disarmed, contemporised and liberated form of calligraphy. Form and content become constitutive of a broader expression that is also a humbler one, marked by great plastic honesty. Text transformed into art and the work embraced as an object respond to one another to become one. Chia Koon plays with the possibilities of a medium that ceases to reflect upon itself. He experiments with different papers, allows ink to penetrate their fibres, and sometimes works on both sides of the support. In Embracing Serenity he uses the same characters, taken from a television series, in four different styles. In Lonely Blank Space and Ten Out Of Ten he experiments with coloured inks, caring little that Chinese ink should be black in the collective imagination, as he uses only a Japanese ink of exceptionally pure density.

His work lies less in the search for the limits of calligraphy than in its use as a medium. Nor is he a painter, or rather, he is one only in works that are clearly distinct and consciously assumed as such. This is one of the principal difficulties of his work, accepting both the legible sign and hermeticism at once, acknowledging that the communicative gesture is an intention rather than a result. Acknowledging that the comfort of reading cannot spare us from a more direct confrontation with the aesthetic and performative charge of the work of art.

Ashing sense

Captured currents exceed the sole surface of interaction mobilised by the painter’s action. The gesture begins outside it and interrupts the deposit of its signs before coming to an end itself, far from the support. The vanity of the inventor, of the creator, fades beneath the hand of the guide. This vertical impregnation is equally a form of underlying revelation: in the painter’s hand, the brush becomes the instrument of the discoverer, brushing into daylight the wonders lying dormant.

This relationship to space is close to the clear sound of a spring, of distant resonance. The whole of space becomes charged with the meaning and form, though immaterial, that occupies it and can be perceived within it. Where painting is often described as a window opened onto the world, a self-contained and ordered arrangement of organised lines, ink moves through gesture only to leave behind the imprint of a passage. […]

The work is not thereby impermanent. Its density yields to neither indeterminacy nor indecision, quite the contrary, its intentional capture of a form that exceeds it in turn densifies the share of choice running through it. Just as the inspirations that set Chia Koon’s creative act in motion, films, songs, phenomenological tempo-objects, which unfold their nature over a non-punctual duration, the brush bears witness to a duration of plastic writing. Sedimented animation transfers its energy to the time required for its reactivation, whether through aesthetic visual apprehension or through reading. […]

Meaning emerges through arrangement, in the nuances of the gesture, in the perceptible yet almost unconscious imprint of the act upon its trace. For Chia Koon, the work is not entirely an imprint, and it would be futile to ignore the aesthetic search that animates it. Yet his approach is never self-sufficient. It is always strengthened by other converging currents, and this density sometimes engulfs it entirely. Ink deposited, redeposited, retraced creates its own frame of reference, sometimes extending all the way to the very foundation of its development.