In a quiet room where time seems to slow, colour begins to melt. This January, Singapore-based artist Dawn Ng unveils The Earth Laughs in Flowers, a new exhibition that transforms ice, pigment, and patience into a deeply personal meditation on time. Showing from 21 January to 1 February 2026, the exhibition invites viewers into Ng’s meticulous, almost ritualistic process, treating each artwork as the residue of lived experience.

For Ng, colour is never static. In this body of work, it becomes diaristic: a way of recording the passing of days, moods, and moments over the course of a year. “What is the work?” she asks. “To me, it is the process, because I lived through it.”

Ng is best known for her distinctive use of ice as a primary material, an especially fleeting choice in the tropical heat of her native Singapore. Building on her earlier series Into Air, she pushes this method further in The Earth Laughs in Flowers, constructing monolithic blocks of ice layer by layer over an entire month. Acrylics, inks, dyes, watercolour, sand, and water are frozen together, forming dense chromatic strata.

Each block is then shattered, sorted, and “sown” onto wooden panels, where gravity, heat, airflow, and time are allowed to take over. Fans, ramps, and heat lamps guide the slow release of pigment as it melts, pooling and flowing like rivers across the surface. Ng’s hand intervenes gently, marking edges, directing pathways, but much of the work unfolds beyond her control.

The result is painterly yet geological. Each canvas feels like a small planet, shaped by forces that echo wind, erosion, and deep time.

The exhibition comprises 12 works, each corresponding to a month of 2025. Together, they form a chromatic archive of the year, absorbing both the noise of global events and the intimacy of everyday life. News cycles, personal encounters, fleeting emotions: all become colour cues embedded into the work.

Seen as a whole, the series reads like a visual calendar, where memory and history are recorded not through words or images, but through movement, density, and hue. These paintings do not illustrate events; they embody them.

The exhibition’s title borrows from Ralph Waldo Emerson’s line, “The Earth laughs in flowers,” lending a poetic lens to Ng’s exploration of impermanence. Her practice is also informed by a long-standing interest in geology and cosmology. Texts such as Marcia Bjornerud’s Timefulness and Samantha Harvey’s Orbital sit quietly behind the work, grounding the exhibition within a broader reflection on humanity’s place in deep time.

In an era obsessed with speed and immediacy, The Earth Laughs in Flowers offers something rare: a slow, attentive way of seeing. It asks viewers to consider not just what they are looking at, but how it came to be, and how time, in all its subtlety, leaves traces on everything it touches.

Featured image displays Dawn Ng for Monocle Magazine. Photo by Paulius Staniunas. All other images courtesy of Dawn Ng and Sullivan+Strumpf. Photography by Toni Cuhadi.

The Earth Laughs in Flowers runs from 21st January to 1st February 2026 at Sullivan + Strumpf. More information available here

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