Cindy Ng was born in Macao in 1966 and was raised in Hong Kong. A period of study in London in the early 1990s proved especially fruitful. In 1996, she moved to Taipei to continue her studies in contemporary ink painting and she held a solo exhibition at the Taipei Fine Art Museum. She has lived and worked in Beijing since 2008.

Cindy’s creative principles stem from the aesthetics of the Song Dynasty. She is innovative, without abandoning tradition; she preserves the deep roots of traditional ink, but she uses contemporary ideas and modern materials to interpret its mood. For many years, she has attempted to liberate ink from its subservience to the brush and its long-standing purpose as vehicle for text and images. She ends the established and almost indivisible partnership between the ink and the brush, bringing ink to video, photography, paper, and oil painting. She has even experimented with new media, including interactive technologies. Her ink works cross regions and media, revealing the unique essence of ink.

Cindy Ng explores the life of ink through a variety of forms, including video, photography, and performance. She never abandons any medium, instead returning to different media at later stages. Ink is both a constant and a fascinating variable – as she describes it: “Ink’s personality mutates depending on the medium in which it is utilized.” Like a film director, she co-ordinates, meticulously plans, rehearses, and executes ink in such a way that she becomes actor as well as director, finally becoming one with the ink itself.