There is a moment, just after stepping backstage at Singapore Repertory Theatre’s KC Arts Centre, when the outside world falls away. The usual orientation of theatre-going is reversed: instead of facing the stage, you enter and are on it. Darkness settles in. Sound softens. And suddenly, you are no longer an audience member; you are inside a mindscape.

The Earth Laughs in Flowers unfolds within this threshold space, where time loosens its grip and perception sharpens. Curated by Jenn Ellis, the exhibition transforms the theatre stage into a contemplative alcove; an intimate, low-lit environment that feels less like a gallery and more like an interior state. It is a gesture of remarkable sensitivity. Ellis does not simply place works in a room; she activates the imagination, allowing the exhibition to be entered as one might enter a dream, or a memory.

The works encircle and fill the space, some hovering just above eye level, others grounding the viewer with their physical weight. The lighting is restrained, encouraging slowness. You move closer instinctively, drawn toward surfaces that seem to breathe. In this closeness, Dawn Ng’s paintings reveal themselves not as static objects but as living fields of energy you can sense.

Ng has often spoken about time as both material and subject. “What is the work?” she asks. “To me, it is the process, because I lived through it.” That sense of lived duration is palpable here. Each work corresponds to a month, but what is recorded is not chronology but accumulation. Sensation, observation, overwhelm, tenderness. The quotidian months distilled into colour.

The paintings resist easy definition. They hover between scales and systems: cellular and cosmic, microbiological and astronomical. At times they feel visceral, even slightly unsettling, pigment pooling and coagulating like bodily matter, yet they are also hypnotic, suffused with beauty. The surfaces read as topological, layered like sediment or eroded terrain, evoking geology, climate, and deep time. One can’t help but think of land melting, shifting, dissolving, and above all, of a planet under pressure.

And yet, there is also wonder here. Ng’s unusual technique, melting frozen cubes of paint, allowing gravity, heat, and time to co-author the image, imbues the works with an almost spiritual charge. Watching the process documented on video clarifies what the paintings already suggest: these forms are not imposed, but coaxed into being. “I’m interested in what happens when I let go,” Ng has said of her practice, and that surrender is visible everywhere.

The title, borrowed from Ralph Waldo Emerson’s line “The Earth laughs in flowers,” lends the exhibition a quiet lyricism. Like the texts that sit behind the work, such as Marcia Bjornerud’s Timefulness, and Samantha Harvey’s Orbital, Ng’s paintings ask us to consider our place within vast temporal and cosmic systems, while remaining grounded in the intimacy of daily life. The month of the year and the self, as the press release notes, are the two constants. Everything else flows through them.

Sound plays a crucial role. Alex Mills’ new musical composition hums through the space, subtle but insistent, lending the works a sense of motion. If you stand still long enough, the paintings begin to feel animated, as though they are slowly rearranging themselves. Colour becomes ectoplasmic, ethereal, matter on the verge of transformation.

It is here that Ellis’ curatorial hand is most keenly felt. The staging is precise without being didactic, immersive without being overwhelming. The exhibition does not tell you what to feel; it creates the conditions for feeling. You are invited to drift, to project, to lose yourself in the space. The stage becomes a psychological landscap, a place where Ng’s inner world meets the viewer’s subconscious.

Seen together, the works feel like a culmination of Ng’s practice over recent years: a masterful command of colour, an unflinching emotional openness, and a confidence in abstraction’s ability to communicate without translation. That all the works have already been sold only underscores their resonance, but it also lends the exhibition a quiet urgency. This is likely the only moment these paintings will exist together (they have all been sold), vibrating in shared space, and a rare time to feel their energies in harmony.

There is a hum in the room, almost like a visible aura that is difficult to name but impossible to ignore. The Earth Laughs in Flowers is not merely seen but absorbed into the self. And when you finally step back out of the darkness and into the light, something lingers. A sense of having touched time. Or perhaps of having let time touch you.

The Earth Laughs in Flowers runs from 21st January to 1st February 2026 at KC Arts Centre. More information available here

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