Anne Ngan is a French-born painter and dancer whose creative life has been rooted on Hornby Island since the late 1960s. Trained in fine art, architecture, theatre design and modern dance in France, she apprenticed with noted theatre designer André Acquart in Paris before moving to Vancouver in 1966, where she worked in costume design and danced with Helen Goodwin’s influential modern dance company.

Anne later settled on Hornby with her future husband, celebrated potter Wayne Ngan. Here she raised their daughters, Goya and Gailan, while gardening, spinning, weaving, working with natural dyes and eventually devoting herself fully to painting.

Her expressive work draws together colour, movement, memory, family and the natural world, reflecting a life in which art has never been separate from everyday experience. Anne has exhibited in Canada and France, with a retrospective at Surrey Art Gallery in 1984, and has continued to paint, garden and dance into her 80s. In 2026, Hornby Arts celebrated her remarkable career with Those things we don’t see, an exhibition spanning 60 years of her paintings and drawings.