On a recent damp Saturday afternoon, Elaine Ng Yan-ling leaves her 21-month-old son sleeping (supervised) in a car and enters a building on Stanley Street, Hong Kong, where she has also brought life to an artwork. Ng used to wince when people called her an artist. She wanted to be recognised as a designer, whose professional beat included biomimicry, clever combinations of technology and fabric that imitate nature. These days she’s more fluid in the way she views her work so perhaps it’s appropriate that the working title for this new piece was Flow.
Advertisement
It was commissioned for The Macallan House Hong Kong, which opened in June. When Ng was approached at the beginning of this year, the original idea was to create several art pieces. She thinks one of the reasons she was chosen was her 2013 work, Climatology_Respired Wooden Skin, now part of the M+ Collection. For that, Ng had engineered smart textiles to mimic how desert plants adapt to parched surroundings – not an obvious fit for a Scottish whisky company.
Elaine Ng poses for a portrait at her studio. Photo: Jocelyn Tam
“They really like the idea of it being nature-related,” she explains of the attraction. “Climatology is a combination of wood and fibres, and how they shift with temperature and humidity.” Wood responding to fluctuations in temperatures is, as she would learn, a vital part of whisky-making.
She had what she describes as “a terribly short period of time” to come up with a design. Because of the deadline, she didn’t actually visit the Macallan estate in Scotland, through which the River Spey takes a triangular wander. Instead, there were online brainstorming sessions. Ng, who was born in London, went to a school in Yorkshire that was popular with Scottish families: “I wouldn’t say I know the culture but I do know the Scots quite well, and the nature.” She’d also been introduced to whisky when she was dating her husband. He’d explained the craft, the layers of taste, the remote Celtic mystique. The couple even began a whisky collection. He passed away earlier this summer. (Later, she makes a simple reference to “changes in the family”, and the challenges of having a young child. Not once, in a 90-minute interview, does her determination to be positive and professional ever waver.)
Production of Elaine Ng’s whisky-inspired installation, Phantasmagoria. Photo: Tracy Wong
It must be hard to convey an essence of a place when you haven’t actually set foot in it. Ng, who is delicate of feature and whose English accent is of the finest cut glass, gives a generous, infectious laugh. “This is as experimental as it can be because I really have to get into my own mind to imagine how it would work,” she says. The only reference she had to The Macallan House concept was the first one, which opened in Singapore last year. Unfortunately, there wasn’t enough time to visit that either. She could see online that it has a silk-and-wool textile mural by Tiffany Loy, based on shades of whisky. Ng soon realised that what’s crucial is colour.
