Ellie Kayu Ng

Latitude Gallery New York is pleased to present Bloom!, a solo exhibition of 11 new paintings by Hong Kong-born, Brooklyn-based artist Ellie Kayu Ng. This exhibition marks Ng’s second solo presentation in New York, further establishing her as a distinctive voice in contemporary figurative painting.

Working primarily in oil on canvas, Ng constructs her scenes by layering thin glazes and nuanced brushwork, creating surfaces that quietly pulse with emotional intensity. Her palette is lush yet subtle, which invokes a dreamlike suspension, while soft, cinematic lighting gently illuminates skin, fabric, and reflective surfaces. For Ng, oil painting is more than a medium. It is a psychological space where garments, mirrors, and carefully posed bodies become gateways between reality and imagination, self and performance. Across her work, identity never fully resolves; instead, it hovers gently, shifts quietly, and multiplies endlessly.

Working at the intersection of realism and surrealism, Ng renders the contemporary city and the self with technical precision, only to let her scenes slip into dreamlike spaces of reflection, desire, and possibility. In Bloom!, she deepens her exploration of identity, self-image, fashion, and fantasy, capturing the fleeting moments when reality bends and infinite versions of the self shimmer into view.

Inspired by a personal encounter with an infinity mirror inside a dressing room, Ng's latest works move between the tangible and the imagined, tracing the delicate boundary between who we are and who we dream of becoming. Through stylized self-portraits, urban interiors, and intricately adorned garments, she transforms the act of dressing into an act of transformation.

"For just a second, I was infinite," Ng reflects. "Beyond the glass, beyond the moment in that dress, beyond mere reflection, I uncover something deeper: the infinite versions of me waiting to be realized.”

Ng’s paintings extend the lineage of self-portraiture as a site of psychological complexity and narrative construction. Echoing the intimate intensity of Paula Rego, the symbolic restraint of Gertrude Abercrombie, and the performative inventiveness of Cindy Sherman, Ng places herself at the center of her compositions—not to assert a fixed identity, but to probe its fluidity. As a figurative painter, she uses the body—her own—as a means of mapping longing, perception, and transformation. In these works, the mirror becomes a stage for the self in flux, and the act of painting becomes a way of capturing not how she looks, but how she feels, doubts, imagines, and dreams.

In her second solo show Bloom!, mirrors become portals, garments become second skins, lamp shade become a hat and the forest becomes a theater of becoming. Pattern, textile, atmosphere, and shifting perspectives weave layered emotional and funny narratives, capturing not only how we appear, but how we evolve.

Bloom! marks a pivotal evolution in Ellie Kayu Ng’s practice—embracing the fragility, beauty, and infinite potential of the self in transformation. With each meticulously crafted image, Ng invites viewers into a space where fantasy confronts reality, and the act of looking becomes a means of imagining what could be.

Ellie Kayu Ng (b. 1998, Hong Kong) is a Brooklyn-based painter exploring identity through self-portraiture. Ng holds a BFA in Illustration from the School of Visual Arts and an MFA in Painting from the New York Academy of Art. In her work, she embodies imagined identities by wearing the outfits she wishes to own, capturing these transformations on canvas. A recipient of the Elizabeth Greenshields Foundation grant, Ng had her first solo exhibition at VillageOne Gallery in New York in 2022. Her work has been featured in juried print exhibitions such as New American Paintings and Friend of the Artist, and has been included in group exhibitions across New York, Los Angeles, Brussels, Tokyo, Milan, and Paris.