Sullivan+Strumpf is pleased to announce Singaporean artist Dawn Ng’s solo exhibition, The Earth laughs in flowers, opening at the Singapore Repertory Theatre Wednesday 21 until Saturday 31 January, 2026. A development of her acclaimed body of work, Into air, first presented in Singapore in 2021, and following solo presentations in Seoul, London, Sydney and New York, The Earth laughs in flowers is a homecoming for the artist, in which she continues her examination of time, colour and emotion, through the ephemeral medium of ice.

This is the first time an exhibition will be held at the Singapore Repertory Theatre, with Ng transforming the black-box space to create a dramatic, immersive experience. On stage a suite of 12 new large-scale paintings made with pigment and earth, frozen into ice blocks, and later shattered and sown onto wooden canvases, will be presented as a meticulously crafted time capsule, each representing a month in 2025.

The more I delved into research on time and geology, it became apparent to me that all landscapes are a result of five main forces: time, heat, wind, water and gravity. It made me think of this process of mark-making, both on a planetary scale but also the scale of my canvas. Over the next two years, I became obsessed with the idea that a canvas could be a sort of micro planet, and that I could orchestrate a way to make paintings by controlling those same forces.

(Dawn Ng, An ode to process)

Ng’s body of work began more than a decade ago as an inquiry into how temporality can be articulated. In The Earth laughs in flowers, the artist draws from a wide range of temporal moments across the year as anchors for her paintings. Featuring 12 works representing each month of the year of 2025, each painting is a microcosm of recent history. From the kaleidoscopic scroll of local and global events, to the minutia of everyday living, Ng takes chromatic cues from these moments to devise a visual language of memory, change, and record-keeping.

Imbued into the anatomy of her works is research that Dawn has accumulated over the years. The exhibition’s titular reference, The Earth laughs in flowers, is borrowed from Ralph Waldo Emerson’s poem of the same name, lending intertextual layers to her composite of works. Deep time and geology are also knowledge wells for Dawn. She references texts such as Timefulness by Marcia Bjornerud and Orbital by Samantha Harvey, positioning the timeframe of her exhibition within a larger cosmic perspective.

In The Earth laughs in flowers, Ng’s study of colour has developed into a rigorous methodology, refining her meticulous processes with each work she creates. As with Into air, she continues to use frozen ice blocks as her primary tool, the most ephemeral material available in her native Singapore. Suspended in these blocks is a careful selection of acrylics, inks, dyes, watercolour, as well as sand of different colours and granularity sourced from various parts of the world such as China, Egypt, and Southeast Asia.

Ng carefully considers each material based on their varying melting points and consistencies, with an eye on how these will affect the bleed of the ice blocks, and the modulations of each colour. Taking cues from geological movements and formations, her process is an exacting labour that spans great lengths of time. Here, she freezes these materials in moulds that eventually grow layer by layer across a month into the monolithic ice blocks, which are then shattered, sorted, and strategically sowed like rock formations onto wooden canvases as her paintings.