Ivan David Ng | Copying Glory

Courtesy of Dr Terence C W Lim

Ivan David Ng is an artist from Singapore and is presently based in the United States. His practice investigates what it means to exist as human wedged between land and sky, drawing speculatively from the contested origins of the Hakka people from China, also known as the "guest people". He attended the Skowhegan School of Painting and Sculpture and was awarded the Gold Award in the UOB Painting of the Year in 2020. He has also worked on projects with Louis Vuitton, Uber Technologies Inc. and Singapore Land Group.

Coping Glory is an early work by Ng and was first exhibited at Untapped Discovery (2016), which was organised by the Visual Art Development Association (VADA). He made this piece after witnessing a luminous double rainbow appeared after an evening storm along Mountbatten Road. From the vantage point of an overhead bridge, the artist noticed many people were photographing the rainbow with their phones. However, digital devices were unable to replicate the true luminosity and chroma of the double rainbow. Created quickly in gritty raku clay, the artist seeks to represent a sense of elegant clunkiness, pointing to the human impulse to document and the futility of copying glory.