HOURGLASS

Dawn Ng has developed an avant-garde body of work based on the idea of time. On the cusp of renewal, the artist shares why her favourite element continues to capture her attention.

- CHANDREYEE RAY

Dawn Ng has a new obsession. “How many breaths on average do each of us have in a lifetime? What are the components of a single breath? Is breath, like a fingerprint, unique to each person?” Ng cuts herself off in an impassioned frenzy. “You know how everyone was so afraid of one another’s breath during the pandemic? Breath gives life, but breath then could take life away.”

The Singaporean artist’s curiosity about the subject comes as no surprise given her long-term creative focus on time, memory and the ephemeral. What could be more fleeting than breath?

Still, true to Ng’s gently subversive approach to the topics she coaxes art out of, her central question lies in the tactile potential of breath—how would you hold breath in a physical form?

Leave it to Ng to find out. In 2022, Ng presented her first solo show in London at the historic St Cyprian’s Church in Marylebone. Titled Into Air, the exhibition was a mixed-medium display of the creation and disintegration of ice. More specifically, in an endeavour to tangibly capture the passage of time, Ng had painstakingly crafted nearly 150 large sculptural blocks of frozen pigment— documenting the process in the form of photographs, films and residue paintings.