Yona Lee

Smart sculpture, 2025
Stainless steel, smart objects, found objects, Wi-Fi
Dimensions and configuration variable
 

Yona Lee is known for her large-scale site-specific installations which unfold in rhythmic compositions of tubular steel. Combining urban and domestic utilitarian objects and structures — such as handrails, lamps, curtains and chairs — her arrangements invite surprising and multi-layered readings. Lee’s work can be both playful and sinister, authoritarian and absurd.

A trained cellist, Lee’s sculptures resemble musical phrases or modular vocabularies: playable arrangements where pops of colour and texture might infer pitch, timbre, or instrumentation. She explores iteration and improvisation, attuning to the spatial parameters of each context akin to the way a musical score can be reperformed in diverse and nuanced ways. Smart sculpture is a new commission which responds to the work of 20th century Aotearoa artist Len Lye and his enduring interest in choreographing movement, evolving technologies, and kinetic sculpture using found objects.

Here, Lee questions what it means to make sculpture from found objects in the networked digital age, one where the Internet of Things — such as Smartphones, Smart Homes, and Smart Cities are increasingly pervasive. Where domestic objects are no-longer passive companions but behave instead like an ‘eye’ or an ‘ear’ in the home — always on, watching and listening, sequestering data about the intimate patterns of our lives.

Smart sculpture acts as a performative score, choreographing both audiences’ bodies and the subtly sensing motions of the devices which surround us. Lee reveals private and public spaces to be complex assemblages of forces, bound by invisible systems of freedom and control.

2025 Melbourne Art Fair Commission in partnership with Govett-Brewster Art Gallery | Len Lye Centre (Aotearoa). Supported by Artwork Transport.  

Represented by Fine Arts Sydney (Gadigal Country/Sydney, Singapore),  Booth D3.

Yona Lee, Exhibition view at Fine Arts, Sydney February — March, 2023. Courtesy the artist and Fine Arts, Sydney.

Dawn Ng

The Earth is an Hourglass, 2024
4K res moving image work, h265 4:2:2 10bit Dolby Vision HDR, 38m: 33s
Edition of 5 plus 2 artist’s proofs

Dawn Ng’s work across a wide range of contemporary media is unified by subtle gradations of colour, which function as a way of exploring the passage and experience of time. Since 2018, Ng has filmed and photographed stages in the disintegration of frozen blocks of coloured pigment. The Earth is an Hourglass, 2024 documents the time-adjusted melting of one such block of ice with the hypnotic effect. Her video compresses the entire 20-hour process of decomposition into a mesmerising 20 minutes.

Dawn Ng is a multi-hyphenate visual artist, who has worked across a breadth of mediums, motives and scale, including sculpture, photography, light, film, collage, painting and large-scale installations. Her practice deals with time, memory and the ephemeral. 

Recent solo exhibitions include Into Air, Kate MacGarry, London (2023); Into Air, curated by Jenn Ellis, St Cyprian’s Church, London (2022); Into Air, 2 Cavan Road, Singapore (2021); and Monument Momento, Sullivan & Strumpf, Singapore (2020). Ng has been commissioned by the National Gallery Singapore (2023); UBS Art Collection (2023); Asian Civilisations Museum, Singapore (2020); ArtScience Museum, SIngapore (2019) and the Hermès Foundation (2016). She has exhibited at the Institute of Modern Art, Australia (2024); Jeju Biennale, South Korea (2017); Musée d’art contemporain de Lyon, France (2015) and the Lille 3000 art festival, France (2015). Often characterized by lyricism and a nuanced use of colour, Dawn’s work has been acquired by the Singapore Art Museum, UBS Art Collection, and Tumurun Museum. 

2025 Melbourne Art Fair Commission in partnership with Queensland Art Gallery | Gallery of Modern Art. Supported by The Ritz-Carlton, Melbourne.  

Represented by Sullivan+Strumpf  (Naarm/Melbourne, Gadigal Country/Sydney, Singapore), Booth C10.

Dawn Ng, The Earth is an Hourglass (still), 2024. Image courtesy of the artist and Sullivan+Strumpf.