The Earth Laughs in Flowers, 2026 (Seoul)
Gana Art Hannam
2026
Installation shot of 'The Earth Laughs in Flowers' (2026) at Gana Art Hannam Photo: Matty Yangwoo Kim
Gana Art presents a solo exhibition, The Earth Laughs in Flowers by Singapore-based artist Dawn Ng, marking her first solo show in Korea in four years since Into Air at Gana Art Nine One in 2021.
Over the past decade, Ng has explored time and the transformation of matter through ice. In her signature series, Into Air, she froze pigment into large sculptural ice blocks and documented their gradual dissolution through photography, video, painting, and installation. Following ice from formation to disappearance, the series treats both as part of one continuous process, a meditation on the impermanence of life.
Installation shot of 'After Paradise II', 2026, acrylic paint, dye, ink and sand on wood, 112.6 x 112.6 x 4 cm. Photo: Matty Yangwoo Kim
In this exhibition, Ng turns to what remains after the ice’s disappearance – the residue and sediment left behind. This shift is most evident in a new body of wood-panel paintings, presented in Korea for the first time. The process begins with 20-kilogram ice blocks made from layered pigment and sand, which Ng breaks over a wooden panel. As the fragments melt gradually under the effects of water, gravity, and temperature, pigment and sand harden into surfaces recalling the cross-sections of riverbeds and coastlines.
'Mountain Holds Light', 2026, acrylic paint, dye, ink and sand on wood 165 x 165 x 1.8 cm.
Detail of 'After Paradise I', 2026.
Detail of 'Pocket full of Posies', 2026.
In the paper paintings, made the same way, dissolved pigment penetrates deep into the paper’s fibres. By repeatedly wetting, drying, and lifting the surface, Ng allows the pigment to continue migrating through it, building further layers of accumulation.
Installation shot of 'Pocket full of Posies', 2026, residue painting on paper, 136.5 x 179 x 5 cm. Photo: Matty Yangwoo Kim.
The photographic lightboxes record ice’s disappearance.
The three media register different phases of one’s event, before, during, and after transformation. The accumulation carries through to the exhibition’s title as well, taken from Ralph Waldo Emerson (1803 -1882)’s poem Hamatreya.
Installation shot of Amethyst, 2026, lightbox, 143.6 x 143.6 x 10 cm. Photo: Matty Yangwoo Kim.
In the poem, landowners lay claim to the Earth as their own, yet in death return to it, while the Earth continues its seasonal cycle of growth, indifferent to human possession. Ng interprets this line not as an opposition between life and death, but as a continuous movement from one state of being to another.
'What Spring is like on Jupiter and Mars', 2026, Lightbox, 38.6 x 163.6 x 10 cm.
Across the exhibition’s different media, this understanding of time takes material form. The wood-panel paintings present landscapes formed through the sedimentation of pigment, and the paper works register the migration and accumulation of matter within their fibres, and the lightboxes preserve the fleeting interval in which this transformation begins.
Where Into Air centered on the moment of dissolution and the impermanence of life, The Earth Laughs in Flowers turns instead to what remains after disappearance, to the way matter continues to settle into new formations.
Installation shot of 'The Great Divide', 2026, 250 x 121.2 cm. Photo: Gana Art.
Installation shot of 'Milk Stone', 2026, lightbox, 147.6 x 74.6 x 10 cm. Photo: Matty Yangwoo Kim.
