Interweaving Temporalities – Royce Ng’s Artistic Journey Through Nostalgia, Speculative Futures, and Transnational Histories

Royce’s work departs from reflections on his own diasporic identity, colonial legacies, and speculative aesthetics. His work has been exhibited internationally for many years, including renowned venues such as the Whitechapel Gallery in London (2017) and the Shanghai Biennale XIII (2021). In this year’s edition of the Chinese Film Festival in Hamburg, Ng’s project Nostalgia Machine, developed in collaboration with Reijiro Aoyama, offers a timely reflection on the shifting politics of memory and the role of media art in creating speculative futures. The work forms part of the exhibition In Between And Never There by Bettina Freimann, on display at the historic Millerntorwache in Hamburg (Millerntorplatz 20) between May 9 -30.

Garden of Forking Paths

Growing up in different socio-political environments and countries, Royce Ng’s describes his own biography as “a garden of forking paths”, shaped by various cultural influences. While his father is from Hong Kong, his mother, though also born there, comes from a Chinese family that had settled in Mozambique in the 19th century. Royce Ng grew up with what he calls a “liminal, in-between identity.“ Raised in the 1980s and ‘90s in suburban Australia, he was confronted with dynamics of diasporic Asian identity-building. Constantly navigating between these two contrasting worlds – Royce Ng has become a “third culture kid”. “I’m not entirely Australian, I’m not entirely Chinese—I’m something in between,” he reflects. This in-betweenness has influenced his identity as an artist, his artistic practice, and his interest in entangled pasts.

Echoes of Trade, Shadows of Home

Royce Ng’s projects are highly informed by interdisciplinary research. From 2013 to 2016, Ng was artist-in-residence at the Johann Jacobs Museum in Zurich, alongside the anthropologist Daisy Bisenieks. Invited by Roger M. Buergel, the director of Documenta 12, the art residency had a long-lasting impact on his interest in the historical formation of multiple modernities and the historical relationship between Europe and formed colonized parts of the world. The museum’s focus on global trade routes, particularly those tied to colonial histories, developed a dialectical relationship with Royce’s interest in Opium trade and global trade routes. During his residency he investigated alternative trade routes that had emerged through colonial networks and extended into the present. Projects such as A Season in Shell (2014) and Mutual Aid (2016) explored the economic relationship between Africa and Asia through immersive media and ethnographic research.

His work at the museum was very personal. His family’s diasporic history was indirectly shaped by the trade routes and colonial dynamics he was researching. “All these colonial forces pushed my forebears around the world so that I could be born in Australia,” he notes. This personal entanglement with history became a touchstone of his artistic research. It became a strategy to address the ambivalences of being perceived as an Asian artist while at the same time being educated in the Western education system in Australia.

Royce Ng’s and Daisy Biseniek’s work wanted to find the connective elements between the past, the present and the future so the duo started to observe the echoes of historical trade dynamics in Hong Kong, where African traders worked with Chinese manufacturers. Their entangled research soon started to shape a collaborative practice, later formalized under the artistic name Zheng Mahler. Royce Ng’s and Daisy Biseniek’s unique collaboration blended anthropological fieldwork with speculative media, creating immersive experiences that examines global trade, the relational networks connecting nature and technology. Their work exemplifies a transdisciplinary fusion of artistic and anthropological methodologies. Bisenieks’s fieldwork, grounded in ethnographic rigor, complements Ng’s more intuitive artistic inquiries. Their joint projects merge the systemic knowledge of anthropology with the speculative freedom of art, creating works that capture the messiness of fieldwork and the fragmented truths of cultural research.

Shifting Mediums

Trained initially in painting and art history, Royce Ng’s early work focused on traditional and analogue art practices. However, he quickly realized the expectations placed on non-Western artists to produce identity-focused work associated with traditional media and traditional artisanal art forms. Seeking broader creative freedom, Ng moved towards interdisciplinary practices that allowed him to explore political and historical themes beyond personal identity. This shift led to an inspiring mixture of performance art, artistic research, and digital media.

Ng’s move from painting to performance and digital media as contemporary forms of art was also driven by his interest in contemporary issues. At the Johann Jacobs Museum, he sparked an appreciation for archival material while at the same time noticing their limitations. “I feel like I reached a limit of looking backwards”, Ng says. Moving into 3D animation and VR allowed him to create speculative environments that could challenge existing historical narratives while invoking alternative futures.

The medium, for Royce Ng, is inherently political. By using technologies often associated with Western innovation, he repositions Asia as a site of futurity rather than mere tradition. He critiques both orientalist views of Asia as timeless and techno-orientalist visions of dystopian futures. His work instead proposes nonlinear, layered narratives that reflect Asia’s multiplicity.

Speculative Futures and Nostalgia Machines

“In some ways, I find looking at the future and looking at the past equally speculative,” Royce Ng reflects. This approach shapes projects like Nostalgia Machines, soon on display at the Chinese Film Festival in Hamburg. The work explores how visions of the future—especially through cyberpunk and 1990s Japanese anime—are shaped by geopolitical anxieties and cultural hierarchies in Asia. Drawing from the aesthetics of dystopian sci-fi, the work examines how East Asian metropolises like Hong Kong have long served as projections of techno-orientalist fears and fantasies. By weaving together theories of sub-techno-orientalism and retro-futurism, Nostalgia Machines dramatizes the shifting balance of power in Asia—from Japan’s postwar dominance to China’s rise as a global superpower. Through layered visual references and speculative storytelling, Zheng Mahler critically reflects on how nostalgia becomes a vehicle for imperial memory, national identity, and the contested futures of Asian modernity.

In his work, Royce shows how nostalgia can be both generative and disorienting. For Gen Z, nostalgia often reflects a longing for mediated experiences rather than lived experiences. “It’s nostalgia for something you never experienced,” he says. “It becomes this reified aesthetic patina, which is sensual and filled with desire, but it’s also haunted and melancholy at the same time.” His Nostalgia Machine is looking into the future, looking into the future of Hong Kong and China. At the same time, it is a very speculative lens that captures also the echoes of history running through it. Nostalgia Machines is not a retrospective but a speculative tool — a “technology” that reveals the affective charge of digital culture.

Asia’s Modernities: Colonial Violence and the Critique of Linearity

Royce Ng’s work challenges Western-centric modernization narratives by examining the unique and often contradictory development paths of Asia. His interest in South Korea, where capitalism thrived under dictatorship, confronted the assumption that democracy and freedom of the individual are prerequisites for economic growth. Ng instead emphasizes that Asia’s development has been shaped by authoritarian regimes, economic pragmatism, and cultural hybridity, rather than following a linear, Western model.

Through works like Kishi the Vampire and The Opium Museum, he put the violence and contradictions embedded in Asia’s economic transformations into the centre of his work. His projects challenge sanitized historical narratives, offering a more inclusive and by doing so non-Western understanding and reading of globalization and modernity. The Opium Museum explores the opium trade’s role in shaping modern Asia, in shaping both the political and economic landscape of the region. Royce uses the opium trade as a lens to examine the exploitation, resistance, and power dynamics that have defined Asia’s modern history. By drawing connections between colonial policies and contemporary global capitalism, he analyses how the opium trade served as both an instrument of imperial control and a catalyst for Asia’s modernization.

Royce Ng’s projects also critique the legacy of colonialism, drawing connections between 19th-century practices and contemporary global capitalism. Here, he argues that trade has long been a mechanism of dominance, with its violent past often erased from mainstream histories. His work functions as a counter-archive, reviving suppressed memories and contradictions of globalization.

The Future of Collective Memory in the Digital Age

Royce Ng’s work can be seen as research towards an exploration of collective memories and past colonial stories using immersive media that sees performance, animation, and digital technologies as corresponding forms of artistic expression. Rather than focusing on historical accuracy, his projects interpret history as fluid and open to reinterpretation. Through the transdisciplinary fusion of artistic and anthropological methodologies, Royce Ng creates „living archives“ that encourage continuous reassembly and reflection on the past.

Works like Kishi the Vampire and The Opium Museum, challenge conventional historical narratives, particularly those surrounding Asia’s colonial past and its economic transformations. His artistic practice critiques Western-centric, linear views of modernization and examines contradictions in global development. By blending historical research with speculative fiction, Ng prompts audiences to reconsider how they understand both the past and the future.

His work allows for a rethinking of history through a multidisciplinary approach. He questions seemingly closed-off units of past, present, and future, as well as rigid systems and preconceived notions. By leaving much open and frayed, his work creates space for new interpretations and perspectives, encouraging new forms of exploration and reconsideration of commemoration.