Singaporean artist Dawn Ng and Malaysian artist Marcos Kueh could hardly be more different in the way they make art. One entrusts her work to melting ice and the quiet rhythms of nature; the other programs industrial weaving machines with mathematical precision. Yet, in Where Are We in Time: A Season Across Shifting Landscapes, Museum MACAN's current exhibition running until Oct. 4, both arrive at the same question: How does time shape what remains?Their answers unfold through radically different materials and processes. Where Ng embraces chance and disappearance, Kueh constructs meticulously ordered textiles. Between them emerges a dialogue on impermanence, memory and the ways cultural identity is continually reshaped.
Melting worlds
The title Atlantis inevitably evokes Plato's mythical island, a civilization believed to have vanished beneath the sea after succumbing to greed and hubris. While generations of historians and enthusiasts have searched for its possible location, Dawn Ng is less interested in the legend than in what it represents: the inevitability of disappearance.
Rather than illustrating Atlantis, she stages its gradual dissolution.
Working with monumental blocks of ice infused with watercolor pigments and dyes, Ng suspends the frozen masses above stacks of Chinese rice paper. As the ice slowly melts, gravity draws the pigments through layer after layer of paper, each sheet receiving a softer impression than the one before. Color disperses, forms dissolve and what remains are delicate traces of an image already slipping away.
