Lulu Ngie’s Minimal Ink Figures Pulse with Emotion

Description

Lulu Ngie’s solo exhibition, Lines of Breath, features recent works alongside specially selected pieces from across her career. Working in Chinese ink and oil painting, the artist removes backgrounds, shadows and textures. Instead, she focuses on the edges and bodies’ outlines, treating them as containers for emotion. Through subtle gestures and poses, she unveils inner feelings of anxiety, fear and vulnerability. These flowing lines carry traces of past experiences while recording present breath and mental states. 

Highlights include “Streaming” and “Stirred,” where bold lines capture the fluidity of shifting bodily sensations, each evolving into a different figure. Another one is “The weight of clouds,” which contrasts lightness and heaviness through liquid-like human forms carrying seemingly weightless clouds, embodying emotional and physical contradictions.

In 2006, Ngie graduated from Hong Kong Art School, majoring in painting. Drawing inspiration from traditional Chinese painting techniques namely the decisive single stroke (yi bi) and strategic empty space, she reinterprets Eastern aesthetics through a contemporary lens. The artist lines shape forms while exploring questions of identity and self-discovery. Her works have been shown extensively, including solo exhibitions at the 2016 ART021 Shanghai Contemporary Fair, Fictitious Force at Art Los Angeles Contemporary in 2018 and Gallery Exit’s The Sensitive Body in 2022.