The Radiology of Feeling: Ronald Ong's Surreal Self-Portraits

For years, Ronald Ong made art with no face in it. Faceless collages, stock photos stitched into surreal little worlds, posted daily so his audience would keep growing. Then one day he took a mirror, held it up to the sky, and hid behind it, and photographed himself doing that. It was the first time he'd ever put himself into his own work.

He almost didn't share it. He assumed people wouldn't want it.

Adobe found it instead. In 2019 the piece became the official Photoshop splash screen, the image millions of people saw every time they opened the program, for an entire year. Strangers started writing to him. They told him the work made them want to create something too.

"If I'm being more vulnerable in my artwork," he says now, "people would feel more connected to it."

He was nineteen. He hadn't told his own family what he'd made, because he wasn't sure they'd understand what it meant. The mirror photo became the hinge his whole practice turned on. It wasn't the most technically accomplished thing he'd made. It was the first time he let anyone see him hiding.

His mother never trained as an artist, but she was good at calligraphy, and she used to show him photographs of herself from when she was young. She told him, more than once, that being an artistic person wasn't lesser than being a scientific one. He has held onto that sentence a long time.

He grew up on Penang, a small island off Malaysia's northern coast, where art existed mostly as a few school periods a week and not much else. What shaped him instead was whatever he could find online, journaling, films, music, and later, hardship. His parents weren't unkind about it. They simply wanted, like most parents do, something stable for him, a career people could understand without having it explained to them. Medicine won that argument for a long time. Art sat where he puts it himself: "in the backseat."

It took him years to understand that the two didn't have to fight for the wheel.

His early work, from around 2017 to 2019, was pure collision. A duck's head on a body it shouldn't have. A banana wearing a face. He called one piece Duck Nana because he'd been eating a banana while looking at photos of ducks, and something about the absurd pairing lodged in him. He had a thousand ideas like that and finished maybe five percent of them.

He built a rule for himself during this stretch: one hour of art a day, minimum, or he wasn't allowed to sleep. He was in medical school at the time, and the art had started as a way to survive the stress of it, then hardened into something closer to a factory line. "I felt like part of me was becoming like an art machine," he says. The audience grew. He burned out anyway.

COVID arrived not long after and did what it did to most people's sense of permanence. "It made me realize how fragile life was." He stopped making things that were clever and started making things that were true. The mashups had never really been about him. He wanted work that was.

There's no fixed way a piece begins. Sometimes an idea sits unfinished for a year before he knows what to do with it. Sometimes he starts with nothing, an empty canvas, and pulls elements toward each other until something clicks. He's grown suspicious of pieces that start from a sketch, because a sketch already carries an idea of perfection, and he can rarely reach it.

Titles come last, always. He finds them in ordinary moments, driving, half-thinking about something else, and he keeps them as questions rather than answers, because he doesn't want to tell anyone how to feel about what they're looking at. Blue Screens Heaven arrived that way, born from too many hours staring at monitors and wanting to put something dreamy against something cold.

Two years ago, in the early stretch of his residency, Ronald was working sixty-hour weeks and seeing death nearly every day. It was a hard season. It also cracked something open. When he found his way into radiology, reading CT scans and X-rays for a living, he started to notice something he hadn't expected to find in a hospital.

"The pixels that I see are telling different stories of different humans," he says, "that go through different paths in their lives." Each scan, to him, is the record of a decision, an accident, a life arriving at this particular moment. He'd spent years thinking of art as his real work and medicine as the practical one, the front seat. Now he wasn't sure the two were separate at all.

"We always say that medicine is like an art of healing," he says. He'd stopped hearing it as an old saying. Now it was something he'd watched happen under his own hands.

His most recent piece makes the overlap physical. Inspection, his first interactive work, is built around a real CT scan of his own brain, taken years ago for a headache that turned out to be nothing. He wanted viewers to stand in front of it and feel like they were looking directly inside him. The mirror photo hid his face behind glass and sky. This one has no hiding left in it at all.

The themes keep circling without quite resolving: freedom, self-doubt, insecurity, identity, the particular ache of not fully trusting how you look or who you are. He doesn't expect that to go away. What's changed is what he does with it.

"I don't think people really see that," he says, of the pieces he still holds back. It isn't that he's afraid they'll be disliked. Some of them are simply too honest to release. "Sometimes it's just too scary to share something very vulnerable."

He's just back from a long trip, in a slower season after a stretch of productive months, with no fixed plan for what comes next beyond a pull toward more of the same crossover, medicine folded into art, art folded into medicine, and a growing curiosity about death and what he calls existential dread, subjects he no longer feels the need to look away from.

Ronald shouts out the artists inspiring him lately: @deekaymotion, a longtime friend whose recent turn toward darker themes has pushed him further into his own; @omentejovem, whose abstractions he's followed for years; Rene Magritte, an influence since the beginning; and @0xTjo, for a collage practice that keeps evolving across mediums.

For future Weekly Dose episodes, Ronald recommends @lewis_osb, @_sigmaX_, and @RJ16848519.