#yeo kaa

[psikonauti]

Yeo Kaa (Filipino, b. 1989)

The only perception that matters is your own, 2022

Acrylic on canvas

[supersonicart]

Yeo Kaa.

Distinct, bewitching works by Manila, Philippines-based artist Yeo Kaa.

"My art," Yeo explains, "is a personal journal and where I share my sentiments, struggles, and anxieties, but aims to connect with the audience by way of its entanglements with contemporary life, current events, and broader human experience. I imagine a world set ablaze with vivid and bursting colors, inspired by pop art and animation, to stage the mundane and render it enchanting to the eye."

"Often, I mix my candy-flavored palette and doll-life figuration with dark and disturbing imagery of violence, infliction of pain, and body mutilations, among others, to shock and evoke discomfort to some, while easing the sensitivity of confronting real-life horrors to others. At times, my compositions are meant to find expression for the taboos and the unspeakable; in other times they are my cathartic release. It is the tension between the pleasant and naïve, and the dreadful and irreverent where I locate my art’s potency. Though I mainly work in paintings, the familiar figures that recur in my art have also come to life in sculptures and installations which I often juxtapose with my two-dimensional works."

SHOP | FOLLOW ON INSTAGRAM!

[thunderstruck9]

Yeo Kaa (Filipina, b. 1989), EVERYTHING IS BURNING, 2020. Acrylic on canvas with switch glass frame, 48 x 96 in.

[lunosphere]

Yeo Kaa (Filipino, b. 1989) — The End of Suffering, 2017. Acrylic on canvas.

[oculablog]

Yeo Kaa ys007 (2020) Fibreglass reinforced resin Courtesy Yavuz Gallery. 

[yeokaa]

A View from Inside

The romantic notion of home paints it as a nurturing, safe place; a haven or refuge from tensions that disturb the outside world. It is a space of comfort and belonging, of warmth and affection. It is where one feels at ease the most, and as the old cliché goes, a place like no other.

In this exhibition, Yeo Kaa unsettles the sense of security and content felt at home through an outward gaze that exposes the perils and menaces hidden or distant from one’s comfortable abode. The phrase “from the comfort of my own home” draws irony from the stark contrast between inside and outside conditions, with the outside as the site of danger and harsh realities of life. Central to this opposition is the attempt to confront the vantage point of a privileged existence—being sheltered or immune from the difficulties and suffering of others by virtue of one’s social position. The home here refers not only to the immediate household, but extends to larger communities—from posh apartment buildings to gated, self-contained residential zones—which similarly detach society’s privileged few from the experiences of the common people. Recent events, such as the ongoing pandemic and the string of calamities that besieged the artist’s native Philippines, have rendered the disparity between the lives of the rich and the poor more pronounced. The works interrogate this gap and the former’s filtered encounter of the latter’s struggles.

The disjuncture among lived realities shaped by social inequality is conveyed in the glass enclosures that blur the depicted imagery in each work. On a remote control’s cue, clear images of natural calamities like floods and forest fires, pollution and environmental decay, are revealed, shifting the audience back and forth between the shielded view of privilege and the more vivid and gripping accounts of difficult life out there. Like the white overlay that covers the scenes of tragedies and devastations behind it, privilege may sanitize one’s picture of reality and disengage us from the plight of society’s margins. These pieces remind us to constantly assess the lenses through which we access the wider world, and to look beyond our positionalities that may conceal truths outside the convenience of our social spheres.

--N.M. Marquez

-----

FROM THE COMFORT OF MY OWN HOME

Yavuz Gallery 

Singapore

04.12.2020 - 23.12.2020

[chaddiction]

I never got the chance to go to Yeo Kaa’s booth. My feet are killing me already to actually fall in line again for so long. Sayang. I'm sure it was a wonderland inside!

[jareckiworld]

Yeo Kaa  -  Killing Yourself is like Killing Everyone Who Loves You               (acrylic on canvas, 2017)