Dawn Ng

Success can sometimes appear inevitable in retrospect, but Ng describes her journey as “non-linear”.

Represented in Australia and Singapore by Sullivan + Strumpf, and awarded the Melbourne Art Foundation Commission for 2025, Singapore-born Ng has found international renown. Success can sometimes appear inevitable in retrospect, but Ng describes her journey as “non-linear”.

“I suppose I was always drawing and making things,” she recalls. “I was an only child growing up in an analogue era, so there was lots of free time to tinker with just about everything. My family lived quite simply, and my mother’s common refrain was that money didn’t grow on trees. If I wanted something, she’d say ‘let’s make it’.”

Despite this creative childhood, Ng says that she did not initially consider becoming an artist. “I grew up in a generation in Singapore where only if you weren’t smart enough, or you flunked out of everything else, then something ‘creative’ could be entertained,” she says. “It seems like a bizarre thing to recount today, which is a testament to my country’s incredible progress of values and attitudes towards the arts.”

After studying English and studio art in the United States, Ng landed a job in advertising and design. “Even in my early 20s, I did not know art would one day become my life,” she says. The turning point came, she says, when she began “working alongside some incredible and visionary creative people across different genres, because regardless of whether you are an artist, an architect or creative director, there are shared values, insights and ways of working to bring something powerful and meaningful to life”.

“I think my role is to deeply question and find – not necessarily answers but hypotheses for – ways of beholding or experiencing something.”

Ng sees her role as an artist as similar to that of an explorer or, perhaps, a philosopher. “I think my role is to deeply question and find – not necessarily answers but hypotheses for – ways of beholding or experiencing something,” she says. “I think that process requires an openness at the beginning, a relentlessness in the middle and a perfectionistic hand or eye to materialise at the end.”

This may seem like serious business – and in many ways it is. However, Ng’s work is compelling in its playfulness, which surprises, delights and absorbs the viewer. Her practice always involves having fun. As she says: “If you are not excited or moved by your work, and you don’t approach it with a sense of humour and silly playfulness, then what’s the point? Creating for me is a cross-pollination of everything.”

This approach generates an immediacy that is key to the conceptual element of Ng’s work. Time and the associated subjects of memory and ephemerality have always intrigued her. “I think time is a subject deeply rooted in where I come from,” she explains. “The fact we experience no seasons and are locked in an eternal summer has a huge impact on how we experience time.”

Ng links this to being part of an “incredibly engineered, young nation that has leapt from third world to first in one generation flat, which has accelerated time for us in a way that is singularly future-focused and compressed”. This is felt in the urban landscape – the buildings she grew up with no longer exist or have been changed beyond recognition. “As a city, we moved to the beat of gentrification and progress.” This “visual amnesia”, as she calls it, drives her interest in time and prompts questions such as “Who are we without memory? Who are we without residue, objects or spaces that we identify with?”

“If you are not excited or moved by your work, and you don’t approach it with a sense of humour and silly playfulness, then what’s the point?”

Ng sees her role as an artist as similar to that of an explorer or, perhaps, a philosopher.

In the recent series Into Air (2021, 2022, 2023) and The Earth is an Hourglass (2024), Ng explores these ideas through layered frozen pigments, photographing and filming the melting process to create potent meditations on time, place, materiality and memory. In the tropics, she says, “ice is that one material that cannot withstand its environment. It is not meant to be here. The minute you take a frozen block of pigment out of the freezer, it starts to weep. Much like an hourglass, its erosion tells us something about time.”

The beauty of these works is undeniably in the striking visual of the coloured pigments that swirl and flow into one another. But even more powerfully, it is also in the poignant connections they create between everything from geologic timescales to the climate crisis, bodily processes and exquisitely delicate feelings such as nostalgia, homesickness, falling in love and heartbreak.

Interweaving big questions and emotions with a lightness of touch and playfulness of spirit, Ng’s work is as intriguing as it is beguiling.

Interweaving big questions and emotions with a lightness of touch and playfulness of spirit, Ng’s work is as intriguing as it is beguiling. Her next moves are, of course, not predictable, but are sure to be fascinating. “There are a range of projects across sound, film, performance, installation and painting that are coming together at the studio this year, so I am trying to manage my time and headspace well,” says Ng. “2025 is definitely a busy year of making.”