How does an artist develop a visual language of his own? What imagery, common or unique, does he draw from? How are these sources reconfigured through artistic practice? What messages are conveyed through this newly formed language?

The Evocative Head revisits Ng Eng Teng’s (1934 – 2001) interest in fragmenting the human body, specifically the head, as a means of developing his artistic expression.

For Ng, the human head serves as a compelling entry point into his artistic practice, a central subject from his formative years of studying and making portraits. These early works, habitually portraying his family members, friends – such as fellow artists Rohani Ismail and Wan Soon Kam, and teachers, reflect his social relationships. Over the decades of this practice, his works reveal sustained formal interests in drawing from faces and heads as enduring forms, alongside the urge of exploring a range of emotive states, from the playful to the nuanced and complex.

Ng regarded the human head as a primary site of expression, using facial features to articulate emotional states directly. This manipulation of facial features was part of his process of abstracting the human head, incorporating formal elements from ceramics, painting, and sculpture, and shaping it through distortion, simplification, and hybridisation. The reinvention of the human head also poetically clued Ng’s regard to the larger question of self. By experimenting with facial expressions and incorporating other body parts, alternating between the subtle or the overt, he created expressive heads that reflected personal predicaments, familial relationships and embodied identities.