Aze Ong: Divine Surrender

Modeka is pleased to present “Divine Surrender”, a solo exhibition by Aze Ong, combining for the first time her fiber art with a newfound practice in ceramics.

The fiber art of Aze Ong has traversed cities and continents in multiple forms: as large-scale installations, collaborations with audiences and public performance. Grounded this past year due to the pandemic, Aze found an opportune time to learn the additional skill of ceramic making. Aze often uses her art process as a vehicle for coping, healing and acquiring a better understanding of self. The repetitive action in crochet has its similarities with the meditative method of wedging, forming and carving clay, to which she had intuitively gravitated. These are two very distinct media but they both posses a shared identity of tradition and long, colorful histories.

As Aze embarked on her ceramics training, she soon realized where the disparities lay: clay has a much higher level of unpredictability. Instead of discouraging her, the breakages that are unavoidable when making ceramics served as an additional learning curve in valuing process over outcome. These challenges paralleled the multiple struggles of the past year, and her eventual acceptance of her vulnerabilities.

By imprinting her crocheted works onto the clay slab, Aze is able to integrate her identity with this new medium. She avoided erasing the imprints by handling the unfired clay with great care. This technique allowed her to transfer the textures of her soft fiber sculptures onto the smooth surfaces of fired clay. The ceiling installation is made of the same crochet works she used to impress these imprints. Hovering like a canopy of handmade organic forms, it humanizes and personalizes the industrial elements of the gallery’s glass box.

One ceramic sculpture is in the form of a house. The notion of home has changed for many of us as the world was forced to spend time at home like never before. In the case of Aze, she worked with an I-Ching life consultant to purge all unpleasant experiences at home, helping her to overcome accumulated resentments and quiet the anger that had been harboring for years. As she began knotting threads on small loops that she had shaped onto the ceramic house, a feeling of unease overcame her. The relationship between fiber and ceramics felt wrong at that moment, yet she continued laboring on the piece until it was completed. In hindsight, she realized that co-existence requires a surrender of expectations, of the ability to live with imperfections. Hence her journey in bringing together fiber and ceramics became a direct reflection of life, just as her past works explored connections, boundaries and their limits.

Like her fiber work, her ceramics took forms from nature: plants, corals, rocks, seeds and cocoons. In many ways, these works contemplate on the complexity of nature and its uncontrollable cycles, moving with the ebb of time, acknowledging mutual respect… “and that divine surrendering lifts up our spirits because our life flows with the universe.”

Divine Surrender is on view from May 29, 2021 – June 19, 2021. 

Explore the exhibition online on EXPERIENCES