opal mae ong

a poem inspired by my time on a couch, chosen kinship, embodied haunts and bodies of water and always grateful to @mugen___________ for our kinship and for one of their many superpowers: acupuncture 🖤🪡

With the hurt and grief of mother wounds, I am often speechless before the maternal. I wanna thank the mothers, grandmothers, aunties, chosen mothers, friendships and beloveds of our no longer whose forces are felt daily. I see maternal love everywhere: in my sister, in the compassion of strangers, in the art of children, and in the hearts of those who long to mother and care for others. I feel endlessly grateful to witness love in action, especially through the infinite worlds I am privileged to glean into alongside my sister and nieces. Sharing some gleanings of love with y’all and sending a lotta love and the freedom that comes with it 💗

digi sketching n thinking about flying without wings, the Binanog dance from the Visayas 🪽 and the habitats of sky islands ☁️🏔️☁️ this all sorta began a few weeks ago when I witnessed a hawk seize a pigeon mid flight (in the 2nd slide you can see it perched along the fence outside my subway stop in BK). I couldn’t help but see it as an auspicious omen: a winged-thing atop another winged-thing… a thing to pin hopes to 🖤 and to be the seer’s eyes 🌀 though the hawk could probably do without my need to make meaning out of our shared ecosystem but here we are

hopecore maybe but thought i’d share some local and global floral portals w yall i love learning the names of things and where they come from. most things feel unnameable to me at first. it’s grounding to discover what is edible, medicinal, &/or toxic along the way. 1. bleeding hearts (asian bleeding hearts), native to North America with some found in East Asia 2. crown flower (giant milkweed), native to India, Cambodia, Vietnam, Bangladesh, Indonesia, Malaysia, Philippines, Thailand, Sri Lanka, China, Pakistan, Nepal 3. passionfruit flower, native to Brazil through Paraguay and Argentina 4. magnolia, one of our most ancient flowers, rooted in East, South, and South East Asia and across the Americas 5. hibiscus, native to tropical regions across the world 6. cherry blossom most common in East Asia particularly Japan

“Always Were” was years in the making, is down now but not over. And I can’t wait to share what’s next with yall 💌 And all I wanna say is friendship is a portal. It bends time, collapses distance, softens the world, and makes me feel more possible. I cannot believe so many of you were able to come to this show. So many chosen family members from different burroughs, timelines, time-zones and countries. I am almost out of words- thank you for friendships both old and new, for holding me, for making room for joy even when life is giving so much hell, and for a friend so loving she got her nails to spell “Opal” 🥹💜 And for those dearest, I have a typical Aries sun burning desire, to be wherever you are, in every lifetime. Call it codependency/enmeshment, kapwa, karma, dharma, community, idc- for me it’s all of it ❤️‍🔥

I wrote a scattered poem beside this small painting titled “Petaled Portal” And today is the last day to see this little one in “Always Were” @platogallery if you’d wanna say hello, I’ll be around there much of the day after being too far away 🌱

Tomorrow, Saturday, April 18 is the last day to see Opal Mae Ong’s solo exhibition at PLATO, “Always Were”. Don’t miss this poignant show, featured in @papermagazine , @twocoatsofpaint , and @booooooom ! Opal Mae Ong is a Brooklyn-based Filipino-American artist whose work emerges from a felt response to nature and a deep reverence for the otherworldly. Combining the remnants of ancestral knowledge with speculative visions, Ong’s paintings form a kind of personal myth-making. Materially, they are built through layered drawing and pigment. The artist uses liquid pigments “with a history,” mixed with acrylic binder. She sources them from Guerra Pigment & Paints, a local supplier known for saving and utilizing rare and discontinued pigments—often from companies going out of business—to create high-quality concentrates for artists. The paintings also incorporate gouache, known for its historical association with draftsmanship. The matte, hyper-saturated surfaces evoke both transparency and opacity, flattening and depth. Color shifts across bodies and environments, reflecting the artist’s experience of mixed-race identity as relational rather than fixed. Figures blur into plants and land, dissolving boundaries between self and world. ​ “Always Were” marks a threshold: a group of paintings the artist feels only now prepared to make. It is both an arrival and a beginning—an opening into a world shaped by longing, grief, love, spirituality, ancestral memory, and the ongoing work of becoming. @slapghost @platogallery #platogallery #opalmaeong #lastweekend #nycart @guerrapaint

“Tabi tabi po” is a Philippine phrase spoken when passing through spaces that may be inhabited by spirits. “Back from the Crocodile’s Belly”, is an anthology edited by S. Lily Mendoza & Leny Mendoza Strobel, dedicated to Babaylan who were killed during the Spanish colonial era. In it, I encountered passages describing familiar lives guided by spirit presences- beings who dwell on the ground, in trees, and beneath water. To step without acknowledgment is to risk disturbing spirit, but to speak the phrase is to ask permission. This gesture of respect becomes a form of protection, “observance of respect is a way of preventing danger as the aggrieved spirits can bring on sickness upon those who caused their danger.” While making “wit(h)ness” I wondered about spiritual trespassing, the slowing of time, supplicating spirits desperately and delighting in estrangement. wit(h)ness 50 x 38 in acrylic and gouache on canvas 2025

Last week of “Always Were” @platogallery and thank you @booooooom for this lil write up and for sharing the show 🖤

Many paintings undo themselves entirely. This one stayed closer to its origin. The process isn’t fixed. It moves between method and intuition. A sketch may propose an idea, but it doesn’t dictate the outcome. Even now, I’m open to the process and medium changing. Lately, I’ve been sketching toward sculpture and installation, allowing it to be, without questioning it too much 🖤 “Dreaming of Eachother” 2026 acrylic and gouache on canvas 24 x 31 in

Lately, on days I travel to Morningside Heights to visit family in the hospital, I’ve been reading “The Wild Edge of Sorrow” by Francis Weller. It’s a book that’s been offered to me by friends, artists and even strangers, and I’m glad it found me when it did. I’ve been thinking about architectural boundaries and their metaphors, something Weller also explores through his five “gates of grief.” In “The Carrying,” a figure, so deeply dioxazine purple they appear almost black, is laid low by grief. A foregrounded gate keeps the viewer slightly out of reach, holding distance from a shallow body of water the figure moves through. The butterflies are inspired by those found in Marinduque, considered the geographical center of the Philippine archipelago. I haven’t yet been, but I grew up in Southern California along the monarch migration path to Mexico. I remember a time when my family and I were homeless, standing at an intersection, when a thousand-pound cloud of monarchs passed through us. Cars stopped, unable to see through their windshields. Pedestrians froze. The air became a shifting mass of orange and black. For a moment, everyone was held there, bent and still, unable to move through the butterflies. Weller, in conversation with Kat Duff’s “The Alchemy of Illness,” notes that “the Indo-European root of the word ‘cure’ means to sorrow for something, and I have yet to meet a sick person who does not sorrow deeply for something.” 🖤 “The Carrying” 2024 acrylic and gouache on canvas 46 x 54 in.

These small flowers are waxy to the touch. Their crescent-like shape is best described as a cosmic legume. If I were a speculative fiction writer, I’d imagine this is where all moons come from. This descending flower, commonly known as jade vine, is endemic to the Philippines. Encountering it at the botanic garden here in NYC feels rare: 1) they’re endangered, and 2) witnessing them is one of the few moments where I am here and, at the same time, transported to the archipelago. “Little Alleluias Against Forgetting” spent time hidden behind other paintings, and in that duration began to reveal nature’s open secret. While painting I wondered if flora are tricksters, and in this instance are trickin me back home. If they do trick and call, consider me tricked.