Welcome to Time Out Singapore's 52 Weeks of #ExcitingSG – our commitment to showing you the best of what's going on in the city this week. Every Monday, a guest writer who's "in" with the scene shares a recommendation on what to see, eat, do or buy in the city. This week, multi-hyphenate visual artist Dawn Ng is putting on an unconventional spin to your regular theatre show as part of the Singapore Art Week at Telok Ayer Arts Club on January 31 and February 14. 11: A Bizarre Social Experiment is a performance-meets-social experiment that engages the audience to be part of the show – like actors themselves. Dawn is known to constantly push the envelope on her ability to craft narratives and has worked across various mediums ranging from text, illustration, collage, light, sculpture to large scale installations, so putting on a first-of-its-kind elaborate performance comes as no surprise for this Jill of all trades. Intrigued? Dawn tells us more about 11: A Bizarre Social Experiment.
Hi Dawn! What's gets you excited about Singapore?
The rhythm and texture of the city.
Tell a bit about a day as an artist in Singapore.
I feel like I am always doing a hundred things in a given moment.
What are your thoughts on the local arts scene?
Diverse and dispersed.
Tell us about your performance piece '11' at Telok Ayer Arts Club. What's the inspiration behind it?
I was wrapping up production for my latest solo, Perfect Stranger, which just opened at Sullivan & Strumpf, Sydney. That work stemmed from a year-long project in which everyday a stranger would ask me a question and I would respond. I find the acute honesty between two people who don’t know each other moving. It suggests a universality and connection shared by all of us, which inspired this piece. You could say this is my first performance piece, but really, the audience is the performers.
What can the audience expect at the show?
To be surprised.
Any upcoming projects we ought to look out for?
Sitting in my studio are two bodies of work that I have been building over the past year. One has to do with ice — I am obsessed with freezing large blocks of colour pigments and then documenting their dissolution. I find much beauty in their ephemerality and eventual death. Solid to liquid, liquid to gas — to me they exist as icebergs of time. The other has to do with text and light.