Into Air: Dawn Ng

By Jenn Ellis

Time—how it flows, echoes, slips, is the subject of Dawn Ng’s seminal first solo show in London, located in the living heritage church St Cyprian’s, Marylebone. As the space’s gothic revival arches curve and meet, they equally cocoon the exhibition Into Air composed of twelve individual works by the leading Singaporean artist. An ambitious assemblage of photography, painting, lightboxes, video and a one-off performance, the oeuvre explores time held in the ultimate ephemeral object that is ice. Set in harmonious dialogue with the church’s grand and minimalist interior, Into Air marks a thoughtful engagement with space and context where each work is apprehended as an individual encounter: how it stands, loiters, hangs, gravitates. From tonality to form, material to mood, Dawn Ng prompts us to reflect on the properties of cyclical passing, how beyond numerical chronology time is a matter of feeling and moment-making.

As posed by Philip Larkin in his 1953 poem Days— ‘What are days for? Days are where we live.’—Dawn Ng encourages us to revel in the being. Each work, meticulously created with patience, attention, focus and pause, takes as a point of departure a material that in itself is very much living. Ice: something created by nature then humans, enjoyed at leisure or considered hazardous, scarce in tropical places such as Dawn Ng’s Singapore, prevalent in others, such as my native Switzerland, a

sign of planetary change. An active material, it is at once emotionally charged and vitally uncontrollable. Yet, Dawn Ng gracefully converes with it, infusing this complex yet simple matter with pigments so that layer upon layer, tone and texture, Time and time over is articulated. An ephemeral foundation for a monumental body of work.

A first encounter is a photographic work. Larger than human height, the work presents a block of frozen pigments. Layered in luscious tones, the ephemeral object is part of a series called Clocks, several of which are placed across the exhibition. Varying in tone, form and scale, each seems to have a particular personality, a sentiment that is reinforced by their distinct titles, each of which are drawn from musical lyrics that Dawn Ng listens to when at her studio. As you read it, you are triggered by chimes, suddenly aware of the church context where sounds travel and one’s presence rings. One also notes how each photograph and lightbox, as every work in the show, is placed within a bespoke wooden structure echoing the language of church pews, which Dawn Ng created with EBBA Architects. Voluminous in presence, each Clocks work is an invitation for you to continue the conversation Dawn Ng has started at the precise slither of time when the topographical blocks are whole before they inevitably dissolve.

As each monolithic fragment evolves the colours bleed into a mélange of tinctures. Filmed as they fracture, the millimetric disintegration is captured in Dawn Ng’s timelapse films, one of which is presented in the exhibition in an intimate cuboidal design. Part of a series entitled Time Lost Falling In Love, they remark on time’s fickleness, how it races at moments of fun, slows during instances of boredom, blurs when falling for another. In the context of a global pandemic, the work is deeply empathetic: how more than ever before we became aware of instances, connection, loneliness; how it’s all a matter of scale and personal perspective; how a blip in time may be an eternity for one and an instant for another; how in the context of the universe, we’re but a speckle in its grandiosity.

From each block of ice’s remaining swirl of tones, a corresponding set of works is born: Dawn Ng’s Ash paintings. The melted pigments receive a form of resurrection through their incarnation as painterly formulae. Each painting is created on a huge dense piece of thick canvas-like paper: crisp yet loose, each abstract surface is both intuitive and delicate. Deeply textural, they evoke the beauty of imperfection, how even the smoothest of skins has crevices or the purest of light has shadow. Akin to giant pages of a book written with brushes in a language all can read, they are each part of a story, the culmination of a journey. Presented upright in a totemic manner as well as laying on the ground, the Ash works physically invite both upwards wonder and a downwards gaze, a circular motion that welcomes glances to where you are more widely: a contemporary instant in the making, a historical site in the harbouring.

Ultimately, each element in Dawn Ng’s show is part of a cyclical constellation. Carefully interwoven, Into Air speaks of creation, degradation, dereliction and rebirth. Encountering this body of work is living a day—’how they come, they wake us’—until they do not. Viscerally moving, each work evokes time’s idiosyncratic and pluralistic nature, how it varies between person, location, experience and objecthood. Into Air sings in St Cyprian’s, imbuing its walls and historicity with an ephemeral moment, like a breath, in which one feels and remembers.

Jenn Ellis

EXHIBITION: DAWN NG, INTO AIR, 18 AUG – 10 SEP, 2022+ EMAIL ART@SULLIVANSTRUMPF.COM TO REQUEST A PREVIEW