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The Earth Laughs in Flowers

Name: The Earth Laughs in Flowers
Start: 2026-08-06
End: 2026-09-08
Location: Gana Art

Free · Jongno-gu Gana Art

Dates: Aug 6 ~ Sep 8
Venue: Gana Art
Area: Seoul Jongno-gu
Price: Free
Enquiries: 02-720-1020

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About this event

Gana Art Hannam is hosting a solo exhibition, "The Earth Laughs in Flowers," by Singapore-based artist Dawn Ng (b. 1982). This exhibition is the artist's first domestic solo exhibition in five years since "Into Air," held at Gana Art Nine One in 2021. For the past decade, Dawn Ng has explored the passage of time and material change using ice as a medium, and in her representative series "Into Air," which ran from 2017 to 2023, she captured the process of ice made by freezing pigments melting and disappearing through various media such as photography, video, painting, and installation. Following the flow of structured ice gradually scattering and disappearing, this work presented creation and disappearance as a single continuous process, poetically metaphorizing transient life. In this new work, the artist's gaze, which followed the process of ice disappearing in "Into Air," shifts to the physical traces and sedimentation remaining afterward. This change is most directly revealed in wood panel paintings presented for the first time in Korea. When an approximately 20kg ice block made by layering pigments and sand is broken on a wood panel, it slowly melts according to the flow of water, gravity, and temperature, and in the process, the pigments and sand solidify like fossils to create cross-sections of terrain reminiscent of river flows or coastlines. In paper paintings produced in the same manner, pigments melt and penetrate deep into the paper fibers. The artist induces pigments to continuously move and permeate by repeatedly wetting and drying paper or intentionally peeling the surface. Coupled with lightbox works capturing the moment ice loses its form, a single event is thus recorded in overlapping layers across three media. The process by which one material transitions into another state is also connected to the view of time implied by the exhibition title. The title is a phrase taken from Ralph Waldo Emerson's (1803–1882) poem "Hamatreya," in which humans claim the land as their own but eventually die and return to it, while nature blooms flowers every season regardless. Dawn Ng reads this phrase not as a disconnection between life and death, but as a process where one state shifts into another. This exhibition similarly unpacks a view of time through concrete material changes across different media. Wood panel paintings capture terrain formed by sedimented pigments, paper paintings capture traces accumulated as materials permeate, and lightboxes capture the instant all those changes begin. While "Into Air" gazed at the moment of disappearance and the transience of life, "The Earth Laughs in Flowers" shows the process by which materials accumulate in different forms to form new landscapes even after disappearance. Through this exhibition, the artist, who chased the ways time vanishes, finally reaches the method of shaping the world beyond that vanishing.

Location

Jongno-gu Gana Art

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