Author: Tan Siuli

Dawn Ng’s works have always been tinged with a sense of wistfulness. Their alluring colour palettes and artful compositions belie a poignant sense of loss, and a desire to remember – and memorialise – that which will soon be gone forever.

Throughout her practice, an acute sense of time and its passing informs the making of Ng’s works; her art is, in many ways, an acknowledgement of the inexorable passage of time as well as an attempt to arrest or suspend it. Into Air coalesces and articulates these themes – along with other related strands of Ng’s practice, discussed below – in three distinct bodies of work.

A similar approach may be observed in Windowshop (2014), a collection of cabinets housing curiosities and common objects scoured from homes and local junk stores.

These former belongings or personal possessions are re-assembled into vitrines, each functioning as “a personal memory theatre” that is quietly – and quirkily – revealing about what people choose to keep, and then discard.

A close cousin of the work, A Thing of Beauty (2015) is a series of photographic ‘portraits’ of sundry objects. With a keen eye for the aesthetic, Ng assembles motley collections of unrelated objects – a back scratcher, a juicer, nail clippers and a scouring sponge – grouped by colour, into surprising compositions that re-train our eyes to focus on these everyday objects anew, to properly see what the artist describes as the “invisible normal”.

By reframing these quotidian items in beautifully composed images, Ng invites viewers to cherish the mundane minutiae of everyday living, the fleeting moment of the here and now.

As a final mention, Ng’s commissioned work for Facebook’s Singapore headquarters, Bang (2016), creates the illusion of a shower of confetti permanently floating down the stairwell: an arrested moment of effervescence, a celebratory climax captured for posterity.

And yet, there is a sweet ache to this (futile) attempt to hold on to this flash of happiness; as one walks over the confetti on the floor and steps, one cannot help but feel that one has missed a moment of joy – a moment that has passed forever.

A notable movement may be observed in the successive iterations of Perfect Stranger. Initially realized in 2018 as an installation of large paper sheets on a white floor, the work’s first form was a wash of gradient hues that again conveyed a sense of evanescence.

Its ‘sister series’ Monument Momento (2018), arguably a second iteration of Perfect Stranger, transposed the distilled conversations onto hefty blocks of coloured marble.

These records of the artist’s dialogue with a psychologist over the course of a year now took on a new permanence and monumentality, reflecting perhaps a desire to memorialise or to pin down memory into something solid and lasting, before it slips away.

In the third and most recent iteration of Perfect Stranger, the coloured sheets of text are displayed on uniform rows of plinths in the atrium of the Asian Civilisations Museum. An austere solemnity hangs over this installation, a graveyard of time and memory.

If lightness and levity are metaphors for the ephemeral – for people, things, and times that slip away all too easily, then perhaps weight is a metaphor for the memorial, the heaviness of loss.

INTO AIR

In Perfect Stranger, perhaps the seeds of Into Air were sown. Speaking about the former, Ng reflected: “This work is … a re-imagination of a self-portrait, and a narrative time capsule of oneself right here, right now. After all, what is each of us, but a vessel of vanishing selves? And the things we thought and felt in a passing moment, the only remnants of the day?” Into Air is precisely a record and remnant of vessels (of time and colour) as they vanish ‘into air’.

Created over a span of three years, the body of work in Into Air continues Ng’s preoccupation with time and her attempts to capture and convey its emotional tenor and elasticity, as opposed to the cold and factual progression of numerals commonly used to tell and record time. In three distinct bodies of work, Ng explores how time can be documented and manipulated.

Clocks is a series of photographs of giant blocks of frozen pigment, each image capturing the changing face of each ice block as it slowly melts. These lodestones of colour replace the sterile faces of conventional clocks, and seek to express a more poetic means of telling – and holding – time: what, for instance, does the ‘face’ of four o’clock look like?

Time Lost Falling In Love comprises time lapse videos that record the complete disintegration of each block of frozen pigment. The laborious capture of up to 20 hours for each ice block is condensed into a video of 20 minutes, effectively ‘bending time’, the strangely hypnotic and cathartic cascade of melting pigment serving as a visual metaphor for the flow of time.

Ash, the final body of work in Into Air, is a series of what the artist terms ‘residue paintings’, created by blanketing the liquid remains of each melted coloured block with large sheets of paper. Left to rest in a vat over weeks until all the liquid has evaporated, the sheets are slowly stained and marbled with tributaries and pools of pigment, a process that Ng has likened to ‘sieving time’.