After spending eight years abroad in places like London and New York, artist and advertising planner Dawn Ng decided to return in September last year.

I came back because a lot of friends came back and they told me that the arts scene was heating up to a certain extent,' says the 26-year-old, who balances her demanding position at Ogilvy with late nights at her studio.

'They described it as a creative gold rush: there are no rules, no one really knows what's going on and if you wanted to do something, you could.'

A situation very unlike the concrete jungle that was Ng's most recent residence. 'In New York, the scene is so developed and it's very hard to break in,' she says. 'I think New York was great, but it never felt like home.'

And Singapore clearly does: her debut exhibition, titled Singapore Cuts: A Very Curious Collection of Lost Tapes, is inextricably tied to her homecoming.

Using mixed media, paper, ink and acrylic, Ng explores the 1980s and 1990s of Singapore in her mind's eye: as a stark meditation on the transformative effects of memory, her work reveals a compelling dichotomy of present aesthetic in the past tense.

'I went back to my childhood and thought about things I really liked or was kind of obsessed with,' she says. 'And because the work is also a retrospective of Singapore, I was also really keen to capture the sense that things in your mind, if you keep on thinking about them, they would repeat themselves.'

This process has resulted in her works featuring several visual signifiers she sees as a 'secret code' that all of her contemporaries would recognise, with images of Ng dressed as a schoolgirl amid boxes of Pocky treats and White Rabbit candy.

'There was also this Alice in Wonderland aspect to them where things are always bigger or smaller than what you remember them to be,' she says of the play of perspective in her work.

'Across the whole series, you can see things constantly repeated in a slightly obsessive way, as if a tape got jammed and it kept repeating the same thing.'

'Singapore Cuts: A Very Curious Collection of Lost Tapes' will be exhibited until March 31 at Know it Nothing Gallery on 51 Haji Lane. Admission is free.

This article was first published in The Business Times.