June Mostra 2019/ Meet the artists…Jade Ching-yuk Ng

As we approach the June Mostra, our third exhibition of this academic year, we will be publishing a series of blogs taking a closer look at the individual practices of our seven resident artists and resident architecture fellow. The first to be interviewed is Jade Ching-yuk Ng, our Abbey Scholar in Painting.

Photo: Antonio Palmieri

More than humans, 2018, linocut, monotype, caran d’ache, gouache, ink on artist-made board, 89,5x70cm

Have you already started to work for the June Mostra?

I’m trying to make two paintings of 190x150cm, but its going to be a lot of work. I would like to have two tapestries of the same colour. Well, like monochrome, so eliminating the colour form that I have made from the previous ones to have a balance, completely monochrome and it is just about lines and shapes.

For the previous one I’ve just finished, I want to make a skateboard base because I want to challenge the flatness of printmaking or painting and making it into a new interpretation of seeing a painting in different dimensions, which is the flatness coming off or out of the wall. The skateboard slide is a reference to the arches that I have seen everywhere in the city and they are highly decorated with figures and intensive imagery.

The characters I’m using are still from my day-to-day life stories, there is a repetition of conversations and I extend the characters into something else. I would say my work is like a milkshake and I really tried not to make it too much of a narrative illustration, I would like people to feel they get to somewhere but all of a sudden they find something else happening in the same space. There is a constant pulling and pushing of a visual distract.

Venetian clock, 2019, linocut, monotypes, gouache, ink, plaster on artist-made board, 89,5x70cm

 

Your prints are full of elements from the world of machinery, often connected to mechanical clockworks. Can you talk about their significance in you work?

In relation to the mechanical elements, I want to question the relationship between the body and our future. Machinery will dominate our future and how we could separate ourselves from that in order to guard our emotion and body as a human.

I always feel I am running out of time, I don’t have much time left. Sometimes I feel my work is challenging how to bring something beyond the time. A lot of people at the March Mostra questioned how I relate myself to history and time and the relation to history and how I relate to now. It is actually beyond time, that is something quite difficult to achieve, I think it will probably take my whole life. The quantity of time actually becomes quite timeless because there is a repetition of it when you start thinking about it all the time.

Room 2002, 2018, linocut, monotype, caran d’ache, gouache, ink on artist-made board, 89,5x70cm

Jade’s work will be exhibited alongside the seven other resident artists in the June Mostra. The opening will take place on Friday 14 June 18.30-21.00. Opening hours 16.30-19.00 until Saturday 22 June 2019, closed Sundays.

Interview by Marta Pellerini (Visual Art Residency and Programme Curator). Photos Antonio Palmieri and courtesy of the artist.