Dawn Ng is an artist who transforms the passage of time into something we can see and experience. Based in Singapore, Ng works across painting, photography, film, sculpture, and large-scale installation, exploring the beauty of colour, light, and materials in constant transformation. In her evocative ice works, layered pigments are frozen into solid forms before gradually melting and collapsing, allowing the act of change itself to become part of the work. Vivid colour, intricate detail, and a beauty that exists only for a fleeting moment come together in her practice. Internationally acclaimed across Asia, Australia, and Europe, Ng’s work invites us to pause and experience the beauty of transformation. Discover her work in person at Tokyo Gendai.
©︎Courtesy of the artist
For those who have not yet encountered your work, could you tell us about your artistic practice and the ideas that guide your creations?
My practice is fundamentally concerned with time — how we experience it, how we try to hold onto it, and ultimately how everything we know is always in a state of becoming or disappearing.
I work across painting, photography, film, sculpture and large-scale installations, and I’m drawn to materials that embody time. In the last decade, ice has become an essential material for me. I freeze large blocks of layered pigments and allow them to melt over a day. Their collapse creates paintings, photographs and films, so what begins as a solid sculptural object eventually becomes an image, a residue, a memory of itself.
My work exists within these tensions — presence and absence, creation and destruction, permanence and impermanence.
©︎Courtesy of the artist
Your works explore the passage of time and moments of beauty through colour, light, and changing materials such as ice and paper. What kinds of moments or experiences inspire you most during your creative process?
I’m most drawn to transitional moments — the period before light disappears, the instant a colour begins to shift into another, or when a solid block of ice starts to dissolve. With the ice works, for example, I usually spend a month constructing and freezing something, which will disintegrate in less than a day. I love the inherent tension in that setup, and the fact that beauty and loss are intertwined by time.
©︎Courtesy of the artist
Into Air, you use ice—an ephemeral material—to explore the space between existence and disappearance. In works such as Perfect Stranger and Merry Go Round, you create large-scale installations that transform the experience of space. When selecting materials and developing a space, what are the most important elements you consider?
Over the years, material has become more than a vehicle for an idea for me. I want the material itself to have agency — to transform, resist, challenge and surprise me. Ice is particularly powerful because it is its own clock. Once it leaves the freezer, the material is already moving towards another state. I can establish the initial conditions of a painting to what seems like the nth degree — in the way I build a pigment block and choreograph the flow of apparatuses to shape the painting. But the ultimate beauty or successful outcome of a work, involves negotiating and managing the circumstances of a melt, which I do not have total control of.
When I work spatially, I’m interested in the difference between looking at an artwork and physically entering one. Scale, light, colour, sound, distance and movement, shape how we encounter a work and alter our perception of time.
©︎Courtesy of the artist
Your works leave room for viewers to connect with their own memories and emotions, beyond your personal experiences. How do you think about the relationship between your work and the audience?
I think my works create a set of conditions for feeling – be it through colour, texture or form – rather than delivering a fixed message.
Tokyo Gendai brings together art lovers and collectors from Japan and around the world. What kind of experience or discovery would you like visitors to take away after encountering your work at the fair?
Art fairs are incredibly stimulating environments where people move through hundreds of images and objects quickly. I want time to stand still for people who encounter my work. I wish for them that moment’s pause.
Thank you very much! We look forward to seeing your work in September.
Some moments exist only once—and stay with us forever. Discover Dawn Ng’s work at Tokyo Gendai.
Dates:
11-13 September 2026 (Fri-Sun) *Vernissage: 10 September (Thu)
Venue:
Pacifico Yokohama
Booth:
Gana Art
Ticket Purchase:
Dawn Ng is a multidisciplinary visual artist who works across a diverse range of mediums, motifs, and large-scale installations. Her practice investigates concepts of time, memory, nostalgia, and temporality. In her most significant and ongoing body of work, “Into Air,” Ng incorporates ice—the ultimate ephemeral material in the tropical climate of her native country—to articulate time’s shifts and nuances, through a series of paintings, films, photographic prints, light boxes, and performance. Often characterized by visual and emotive connections to landscape and geology, Ng’s work explores time’s transience through markmaking in a resplendence of color, texture, and detail.
To date, the artist’s work has been collected and commissioned by various international institutions and museums across Asia, Australia, and Europe.
