The Two Lives of One Place
Julieanne Ng grew up in a place where the view from the window is not of trees or streets, but of molds, pallets, and stacked plastic houseware. Her family’s factory in Valenzuela runs below and around her life: machines humming, products lining up, everything organized towards output. It was where the day began and ended, where life and livelihood existed in a single building. Yet it remained a world she could not enter with ease: the crowded pathways, shelves stacked taller than people, their plastic products arranged like walls. It is an environment that has shaped her completely and yet has never quite made room for her.
For years, Ng tried to meet this place on its terms by working with what it produced. She studied objects that were designed to be unnoticed: plastic cups, small household goods, utilitarian things meant to pass through a life without leaving a mark. Her practice had long begun from this site. Working with these materials has been her way of understanding how a life can be built inside a system of repetition and utility, and where an artist might stand in the middle of it.
In the exhibition “Manual for Making Space”, she turns to the factory’s own way of seeing: the CCTV monitors in her father’s office. The cameras capture everything the system deems worth tracking. Products move. Machines churn. Workers appear and disappear. The frames change, but the feeling stays the same: all this precision, and still no place to stand.
Ng photographs these screens, and then transfers the images by hand onto acrylic—a process of scrubbing, erasing, and revealing. The transfer is imperfect; what is lost is as important as what remains. Stacks of items become hazy shapes. Time stamps dissolve. The factory’s logic thins out. What survives are hollowed forms, tunnels, and pockets that no longer read as inventory but as caverns of air. In the absence of clarity, something unexpected emerges: space.
From these remnants, she traces the small routes where bodies once moved. The brief openings between piles, thin walkways, and irregular contours become map-like drawings of how a person navigates a place that never pauses for them. The drawings are not symbols or metaphors; they are acts of locating, however provisionally.
Ng is not trying to conquer this environment or dramatize its discomfort. She is trying to recognize it, not as her inheritance alone, but as a presence she has lived alongside her entire life. Through these images and mappings, she acknowledges both the intimacy and estrangement of her upbringing, and asks the factory a question she has never dared to voice aloud: If I have been shaped by you, is there room for me here at all?
Written by Ottilio Carantes
