ABOUT THE ARTIST

The recent work of Ngai Ning Yu explores the concept of the home in relation to memory and the contrast of presence and absence in a space touched by human intervention. Her paintings depict uninhabited places where traces of human presence are felt in what’s left behind - shadows, unmade bedclothes, door handles, thus commenting on the fleeting nature of existence and the imprint of time being represented in a physical way. 

In “The Concept of the Home”, the artist explores the construction of spaces that live on in memory, where subject matter exists without the ties of yesterday and tomorrow, frozen in the stillness of a single moment, a state of being nobody can return to. The artist works from photos and memories of nooks and shadows of places once inhabited, and thus can be indirect self portraits that have a deeply nostalgic and lonely undertone. Bringing viewers into the privacy of the home interiors in her memory creates intimacy, yet the paintings also resemble archetypes of a space eerily familiar, leaving viewers halfway without resolve in an anonymous, almost “template” place.

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