Artist Guy Ngan 顏國 鍇 was a second-generation Pacific Chinese-New Zealander.

Living in New Zealand, Ngan was intensely interested in the global, historical migrations of peoples and their cultural and genetic links. Ngan’s sculptures were inspired by Roman ruins, Chinese calligraphy, local landscapes, ocean-carved rock formations and modernist architecture.

Well-known for his over forty public sculptures, carvings, and murals across New Zealand, Tahiti, and New York, Ngan believed that buildings should reflect our feelings and wrote ‘The office is where we come into contact with other people on an average of eight hours a day, five days of the week. To have an appropriate work in your office is more important than to have a great work of art.’ For over 25 years, Guy Ngan’s large-scale textile work ‘Forest in the sun’ (1976) hung in the Beehive before being gifted to the collection of Te Papa Tongarewa.

Guy Ngan 顏國 鍇 (born 1926, Wellington, died 2017, Lower Hutt) studied in New Zealand, the United Kingdom and Italy, and worked in architecture before becoming a full-time artist and designer in 1970. He received an OBE for services to the arts in 1983. In 2012, at age 86, Ngan was inducted into The Massey University College of Creative Arts Hall of Fame. The Dowse Art Museum produced the exhibition, Guy Ngan: Habitation in 2019 which later toured New Zealand. This survey of his life’s work encompassed sculpture, paintings, prints and textile works alongside archival photographs.