Ivan David Ng | Untitled Land

Courtesy of the artist

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.

Untitled Land was first displayed in Ivan David Ng’s solo exhibition Roads Around a Mountain (2022) with Chan Hori Contemporary, Singapore. Created using his collage-painting method, the work is composed of landscape images sourced from books, television and Google Street View. These images are dislodged from their original medium and context, becoming nameless pictures of hills, fields, and lakes, which scrambled together on the painting’s surface. Ruminating on his family’s Hakka ancestry, the resultant work is about longing, scattering and the blind reconstitution of an elusive native land. The act of painting becomes a means of knowing and speculation backwards in time.