‘Roads Around a Mountain’ – The World is Quiet Here
By Clara Che Wei Peh

‘Roads Around a Mountain’ was Ivan David Ng’s first solo exhibition in Singapore and a critical milestone in his artistic career and growth. The exhibited paintings were the culmination of over two years of work, as the pandemic brought many of our lives – including Ivan’s – into a geographical standstill. Weaving together his spiritual and bodily travels, the exhibition, curated by Chan Hori Contemporary, and held at Gillman Barracks as part of Singapore Art Week, offered a window towards another world.

Ivan David Ng, ‘Clutter’, 2021, digital print, acrylic, watercolour, kozo paper, handmade gampi paper, epoxy, canvas, nylon lycra on panel. Image courtesy of Darrell Loh and Chan + Hori Contemporary.

Circumambulation is the ritual of walking in a circular motion, often around an object of veneration. The action is also practised as a form of prayer and demonstration of faith, across different religions and beliefs. In this exhibition, the gesture of circumambulation is also compared to our eternal longing for respite, as we continuously circle around the elusive mountain of the self, imagining that true rest and peacefulness await us if we can scale its heights.

The desire to rest was one of the main things that emerged in my first conversation with Ivan, as we sat in his studio, the paintings still unframed. Although in different moments in our individual lives, we immediately connected over our mutual wish for a hard break – to take a breather from the rhythm of our daily life, and to have the space to build towards a clearer mind. Paradoxically, while spending the past two years living in a global pandemic and a world forced on pause, our lives have continued spinning, maybe even at a faster tempo. In the age of the 24/7 (as Jonathan Crary outlines in his book of the same title) and the rise of work-life singularity, the necessity of working from home and the broad inability to travel have also accelerated the erosion of boundaries between work and rest.

Installation shot of ‘Rounds Around a Mountain’, 2022. Image courtesy of Darrell Loh and Chan + Hori Contemporary.

For some, being encapsulated within this contradictory environment of the physical standstill and mental hyper-speed has also allowed longstanding thoughts to consolidate and evolve, as they take this time to reach further within and seek inner resolution. Ivan is one of such, as he elucidates this ongoing search in the language of painting, collage, and assemblage, and invites us into his journey with “Roads Around a Mountain”.

Standing in front of Ivan’s paintings, I find myself enthralled by the many worlds enclosed within the frames. Each painting is made up of ever unfolding memories and imaginations, both of places once travelled and of worlds beyond. On top of materials familiar to us, such as acrylic, tempera and Chinese ink, Ivan has also introduced objects and fragments from his past, tangible gestures towards a feeling, a memory. There’s paper made of a mulberry plant from Xinjiang, the dust gathered from grinding a rock he had collected from the mountains somewhere. In his studio, we searched for the sun and the moon encased in his paintings, from photographs he took on his phone from a recent celestial phenomenon to cyanotype and darkroom paper holding sunlight from a particular moment that had gone by. Like Ivan and many others, I have been grounded in my locality and Singapore over the past two years, and have been yearning for the possibility to travel, to be taken outside of the mundanity of my daily routine and reconnect with or discover new magic. In our conversations and in the unexpected materials interwoven on his panels, I found new entries into these adventures I had been seeking. Each painting a window into the outside world, not of a specific location but of a feeling, or a reminder that the world is much bigger than that of our own, even if we cannot always remember to see it.

“Standing in front of Ivan’s paintings, I find myself enthralled by the many worlds enclosed within the frames. Each painting is made up of ever unfolding memories and imaginations, both of places once travelled and of worlds beyond.”

Ivan David Ng, ‘We will feast and weep no more’, 2021, kozo paper, digital print of phone photographs, scanned books and google maps, arches paper, oil paint, acrylic, tempera on panel. Image courtesy of Darrell Loh and Chan + Hori Contemporary.

Ivan David Ng, ‘Conjuring in a dust spout’, 2021, block printed fabric, acrylic, epoxy, archival digital print, inkjet print, kozo paper, air, pvc plastic, canvas on panel. Image courtesy of Darrell Loh and Chan + Hori Contemporary.

Building on circumambulation as a framework, Ivan has also incorporated religious tableaus and manuscripts as images and materials, to aid our sight of this world beyond. Using religious sites and images such as Dunhuang’s cave paintings and Saint Chapelle’s stained glass, Ivan makes reference to the spiritual. The undergirding compositions of paintings in this series are often illuminated manuscripts, which had been commissioned by religious bodies to visualise concepts in scripture. They serve as a starting point to the works but are quickly hidden or obstructed from view. Ivan compares this to the process through which the human behaviour makes it difficult for us to access the clarity that is symbolised in these images. It is only when we have come to this realisation and intentionally reapproach this subject to peel back the layers and try to reach back to what’s pure and true, that we can understand the message underneath. In parallel, Ivan not only builds and adds in his paintings, but also excavates these layers, to re-uncover and reveal the original found object underneath.

Seeking true rest seems a near impossible task in times like ours, even more so in a space that moves as it does in Singapore. Through the circumambulation that Ivan embarks on to lead up to “Roads Around a Mountain”, however, something seems to emerge. Perhaps the search does not have to lie in the external environment, be it our geographical location or the rhythm moving around us, but in the spaces that are deep within. Maybe all the things we are looking for could be within us, if we could just be still enough to listen.

Join Ivan and Clara on their winding conversation recorded as a podcast episode here.