Ellie Ng Kayu: Bloom!

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, on view from May 7 through June 7, 2025. This exhibition marks Ng’s second solo presentation in New York, further establishing her as a distinctive voice in contemporary figurative painting.

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 ZigZag, Ellie Kayu Ng constructs a layered self-portrait entwined with the surreal logic of dreams and fashion. Poised en pointe beside a zebra in a dense forest, the artist blurs the line between woman and animal, artifice and nature, control and instinct. The doubling of their limbs and gaze creates a quiet tension, inviting the viewer to question where identity ends and projection begins. Like much of Ng’s work, this painting transforms an external pose into an internal revelation.

In Night Swim, Ng submerges the self into a dreamlike, hyper-saturated field of sequined water, encircled by tangled leaves and blooming flowers. The figure—modeled after the artist herself—floats both freely and entangled, her expression clear-eyed yet distant. As in much of Ng’s work, the landscape is lush but uncanny, a constructed dreamspace where fashion, fantasy, and feeling collide. Here, the self is refracted: between surface and depth, stillness and drift, visibility and entrapment.

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.