Pastel prisms: Dawn Ng’s free-ranging installation at Hermès’ Aloft space

Interior angled walls
Artist Dawn Ng has created an installation for Aloft at Hermès in Singapore, to inaugurate the brand's refurbished flagship store. Pictured: installation view
(Image credit: Dawn Ng & Hermès)

When Singaporean curator Emi Eu approached compatriot Dawn Ng to create an installation to inaugurate Hermès’s refurbished flagship store, the visual artist barely hesitated. For one thing, it’s not everyday that the sixth-generation marque comes knocking. And for another, the site – Aloft at Hermès – is both a brand new, fourth-floor column-less exhibition space that is one of just five Fondation d'entreprise Hermès art spaces in the world, and the perfect blank canvas for Ng’s expansive, free-ranging installations.

‘When Emi approached me with the Hermès commission, she spoke of new perspectives and horizons,' Ng recalls. ‘I thought about newness in the context of the world we live in today, which tends to shout or blare, to rise above the visual or social noise around us and create a big bang. I wanted to take the work in the opposite direction to a place that was soft, naive and innocent.’

The result is all that and more. Anchored by large pastel-hued plaster and wood blocks whose ends are lined with slender slabs of mirrors, the all-white room engenders an immediate sensation of quiet stillness. The random placement of the blocks creates physical gullies that coax visitors to flow in and out of spaces, their presence reflected in fleeting, disembodied mirrored glimpses. The concept is disarming in its simplicity and unexpectedly moving in the experience.

Ng says the abstract colour planes – an idea that owes much to the French post-war artist Yves Klein – represent different portals, and their symbolic and psychological ability to usher people from one place, time, or self, to the next, so that they disappear and re-emerge again.

‘I felt this softness and purity was much more powerful and startling when transformed into a surreal environment for someone to be immersed in,’ she says. ‘I wanted to create an abstract sense of moving through the soft pastel colour planes of an early horizon – that child-like, ephemeral place between sleep and consciousness, that gentle awakening to a new beginning.’

Close up of angled walls with mirrored ends

The space is a new fourth-floor, column-less exhibition hall that is one of just five Fondation d'entreprise Hermès art spaces in the world, and the perfect blank canvas for Ng’s expansive, free-ranging installations

(Image credit: Dawn Ng & Hermès)

Close up of angled walls

Anchored by large pastel-hued plaster and wood blocks whose ends are lined with slender slabs of mirrors, the all-white room engenders an immediate sensation of quiet stillness

(Image credit: Dawn Ng & Hermès)

Close up view of light blue, pink and mirrored walls

The random placement of the blocks creates physical gullies that coax visitors to flow in and out of spaces, their presence reflected in disembodied mirrored glimpses

(Image credit: Dawn Ng & Hermès)

Artist Dawn Ng looking to the side against light background

Ng (pictured) explains, ‘I wanted to create an abstract sense of moving through the soft pastel colour planes of an early horizon – that child-like, ephemeral place between sleep and consciousness, that gentle awakening to a new beginning’

(Image credit: Dawn Ng & Hermès)

INFORMATION

'How to Disappear into a Rainbow' is on view until 14 August. For more information, visit the Fondation d'entreprise Hermès website

Photography courtesy the artist and Hermès

ADDRESS

Aloft, Hermès
541 Orchard Road
#01-02A Liat Towers
Singapore

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Daven Wu is the Singapore Editor at Wallpaper*. A former corporate lawyer, he has been covering Singapore and the neighbouring South-East Asian region since 1999, writing extensively about architecture, design, and travel for both the magazine and website. He is also the City Editor for the Phaidon Wallpaper* City Guide to Singapore.