Contemporary Artist Annysa Ng | Paintings, Drawings, Assemblage & Installations

Artist Statement

My practice investigates the intersections of history, identity, gender, the unconscious, and perception across shifting states of consciousness. Working through painting, drawing, assemblage, and installation, I approach these subjects through an ongoing dialogue between material process and conceptual inquiry.

The faceless silhouette in my paintings—adorned with both traditional Chinese costume and period European fashion—is stripped of individuality yet draped in symbols of power and beauty. The silhouette—both presence and absence—destabilizes fixed notions of identity, proposing instead that identity is constituted through shifting and performative surfaces, whether inherited, chosen, or digitally mediated.

By layering temporal and cultural dissonances, my work illuminates the hybridity, theatricality, and constructedness embedded in chinoiserie—Europe’s imaginative reconstruction of “Chineseness.” Once framed by imitation, chinoiserie now articulates hybridity as a generative form of originality. Engaging this ornamental language dialogically, I appropriate and reconfigure its visual codes to reveal the entanglements of cultural desire, imitation, and translation. Through deliberate anachronism, I merge Eastern and Western historical references to question authenticity, authorship, and the politics of representation.

In my installations and assemblages, I engage the structural and metaphorical potential of found objects and spatial arrangements to expose latent narratives and critique sociopolitical conditions. Rather than pursuing recurring themes, my work evolves in response to emergent questions and observations.

By merging the historical with the personal, and the conscious with the unconscious, I seek to reconsider the contingencies that shape selfhood, perception, and the instability of reality itself.

- Annysa Ng