UBS Monocle
Time for colour
Dawn Ng
Visual artist
Our perception of time is never the same. It stretches when bored and shrinks in the moment. Dawn Ng, who hails from a city-state without seasons, grapples with the passage of time in her practice. “How would we tell time if we had thrown away all our clocks?” she says. “Can it be through colour, shape and form?”
This thought led Ng to explore ice as part of her multidisciplinary practice. “As Singapore is located near the equator, ice is the ultimate ephemeral material,” she says. “It collapses immediately, telling of time and its movement.” Ng freezes colour pigments into 60kg layered blocks, before keeping vigil as the ice melts away. “Time, in its solid form, is forever weeping, crying and dying in front of you,” she says.
Ng has created more than 180 hunks of ice, each needing at least a month to cohere. Every detail is methodologically documented, from the pigments to the temperature and volume of the water. “It’s like stacking dominoes,” she says. “I’m continually tightening and refining the process, even though you can’t gain full control of everything.”
Her obsessions with colour and exacting nature radiates in White, a large-scale lenticular installation of ethereal gradient hues that illuminate the lobby wall of Singapore Land Towers. “I pulled the colours to their softest hues, modulating them down to a whisper,” she says.
As you break down the building blocks of Ng’s artistry, you uncover an unerring attention to detail and a devotion to presence. She shows that, on Singapore’s terms, craft is never just about romance and heritage; rigour and heterodoxy have a part to play too. That’s why this island is special.
See Dawn Ng’s
White installation at the Singapore Land Towers. She presents a solo show at Frieze London.
dawn-ng.com
