I was running late! Beads of sweat cascaded down my neck as I hurriedly made my way to the studio of Singaporean artist Dawn Ng. Time sure is funny, seeming to swell during a pregnant pause or shrink when we need it most, but I needn’t have worried — I was greeted with both warm, reassuring welcomes and a cool rush of air that escaped the studio’s heavy white doors. 

Indeed, time was of the essence on that balmy day last November, in more ways than one. Ng was preparing for her solo exhibition The Earth Laughs in Flowers (currently on view at the Singapore Repertory Theatre till 31 January 2026), which would comprise 12 large-scale paintings, each corresponding to a month of the year. This studio visit, then, was a momentary pause in the eye of the storm, briefly suspending the flurry of art-making, graciously allowing us to glimpse the exhibition-to-be. Standing next to her painting January (2025) and a table full of tidily organised research materials, Ng shared with us a few words elucidating her practice. 

Growing flowers in a laboratory

During my visit, all the works but November and December were on view. On each monumental panel — some measuring over two metres tall — splendid shades of pink, green, and blue pooled in clear epicentres, blended with each other, and languidly meandered towards the very edges of the wood. Ng explained that these technicolour tones and tinctures corresponded to visual associations she made each month, meaning that the full set of paintings would capture the routines and experiences of her life for a whole year — quotidian observations, transformed by art into billowing resplendence. 

Organic and spontaneous as they may appear, Ng’s works emerge from a long process of labour and laboratorial experimentation. Bathed in the mixture of natural and fluorescent light flooding her studio, Ng took us through the recent trajectory of her artistic practice. 

Ever the alchemist, Ng has been working with blocks of frozen pigment for several years, turning icy layers of watercolour, acrylic, and dye into paintings, photographs, and video works. Her longstanding body of work Into Air (2018–present) captures her wistful ruminations on ephemerality and time: the melting ice blocks allow us to physically observe time as it passes, thawing into pure prismatic colour and leaving behind inky residues.

The Earth Laughs in Flowers is a continuation of this body of work, with some new technical developments. Beyond the pigments used in Into Air, Ng has now introduced sand and sediment into her multilayered ice blocks. The resulting undulating forms, Ng explained to us excitedly, are the culmination of endless trials and investigations — studying the materials’ melting rates, colours, and consistencies, and how they react with other substances. She recalled how she would, with the support of her assistants, wheel ice blocks from her freezer and haul them onto strategic spots on her panels, turning her studio into a laboratory for assiduous creative research. 

Free-flowing as the 12 new works seem, then, they exemplify an artist’s delicate dance on that razor’s edge between happenstance and intention, between chance and control.

A collaboration with time

There is something deeply geographical about Ng’s work, the little inlets and crevices of colour mirroring landscapes of rivers and mountains. Take July (2025), with its sedimentary textures and subtle tones of custard yellow, crimson, blue, and ochre — a visual memory of Ng’s visit to the United States that month, where she saw the natural geological formations and brilliantly coloured sulphur springs of the Yellowstone National Park. 

Far from incidental, this terrestrial bent is a key conceptual element of Ng’s practice. Speaking to us in the studio, Ng cited a paragraph from Samantha Harvey’s 2023 novel Orbital as a literary analogue for the kinds of sentiments she hoped The Earth Laughs in Flowers would evoke: “The earth, from here, is like heaven. It flows with colour. A burst of hopeful colour. When we’re on that planet we look up and think heaven is elsewhere, but here is what the astronauts and the cosmonauts sometimes think: maybe all of us born to it have already died and are in an afterlife.”

Pondering what I have seen of Ng’s methods through this studio visit, I think of another passage from the same book, just a few pages on: “The planet is shaped by the sheer amazing force of human want, which has changed everything, the forests, the poles, the reservoirs, the glaciers, the rivers, the seas, the mountains, the coastlines, the skies, a planet contoured and landscaped by want.” For as much as Ng’s crackling and billowing fields of colour are poetic reflections on time — how it stretches and suspends, entwines itself with our lives, yet all the while passes us by — they are also the outcomes of creative agency, the million minute choices which Ng makes during her art-making process, now unveiled to audiences after an entire year.

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Presented by Sullivan+Strumpf as part of Singapore Art Week, The Earth Laughs in Flowers runs at the Singapore Repertory Theatre till 1 Feb 2026. Visit sullivanstrumpf.com to find out more. 

A new short documentary film on Ng’s artistic process can also be viewed here. 

Header image courtesy of the artist and Sullivan+Strumpf with photography by Toni Cuhadi.