The Columns Gallery is pleased to present sculptures by contemporary sculptor and installation artist Yeo Chee Kiong (b. 1970). Having studied at the Nanyang Academy of Fine Arts (Singapore) and the Glasgow School of Art (UK), Yeo is fascinated with the language and spatial relationship between object, space and authorship. His work destabilises the familiar notions of spatial proportions and perspectives, whilst examining the human conditions in the construction of an extended surreal world.
Bubblelloon, is an ideal state of imaginative perfection, to reflect the sculptor’s mischievous desire in proposing an unprecedented sense of a beautiful ‘formless’ form. It is one of the key sculpture element under the umbrella of A Beauty Centre Project 2016. The sculptures featured push the viewer to engage in “self-improving” activities, being given space and time to reflect on their own ideals, as well as contemporary “self-enhancement” obsessions, from fitness and body “sculpting”, and the breathless race to achieve “mindfulness”, to flaunting a sense of a self-loved self. Central to Yeo’s works are his exaggeratedly female globular forms, bloated on a caricatured sexuality that verges on the comic, grotesque and cute at the same time. Yeo’s sculptures can be seen as Art mirroring its own mirrored artifice, yet remaining deeply inspired by natural forces.
There is definitely a sense of excess sexuality in Yeo’s cumulus-cloudlike gorged and turgid female pink and silver forms, as they appear to luxuriate in their swelling roundness. Excess as opposed to elegance animates Yeo’s sculptural forms of feminine beauty: they straddle inherited baroque and rococo aesthetics, and we can accept that both approaches are inspirationally available to contemporary practitioners regardless of socio-cultural contexts. Yeo’s critic of contemporary society’s narcissistic obsessions could be read as veering on the voyeuristic, or misogynistic. Still, artistic ideals of “perfection” are evident, as the artist takes pride in production quality of each object. The sculptor too is on a quest for beauty.
Venue: The Columns Gallery, Blk 22 Lock Road #01-35 Singapore 108939
Opening Hours: Tuesday to Friday: 11am — 7pm
Saturday: 11am — 6pm, Closed on Mondays & Public Holidays
When: 15 Jan - 6 Mar 2021,
