Yavuz Gallery is excited to debut at Art Busan 2022 in South Korea featuring Filipino-artist Yeo Kaa. Titled POV, this solo presentation showcases new sculptural works and large-scale paintings.
A perfect dichotomy of colour and torment, Yeo Kaa's renown candy-coloured characters are deceptively stuck in violent states of reality. The stylised figuration in her works invokes animation and fictional characters from children's books, a fantasy world that exists only in dreams and imagination. Her practice functions as a personal journal where the artist shares her struggles and anxieties, which aims to connect with audiences through its entanglements with contemporary life, current events, and the broader human experience.
In this presentation, Yeo Kaa recounts instances of fragility frequently gripping the human psyche. In works that bear her imprint of sugary palette coating mostly themes of distress and anguish, she pictures how one struggles with dissatisfaction and the scathing effects of social standards and expectations. Heavily drawn from autobiographical inspirations, these works navigate through issues of the body and outward appearances, paranoia over social judgement, and fixation on acquiring material things, among others. The paintings contain the compositions in a range of imperfect squares, an allusion to our flawed nature as human beings ironically striving for an elusive perfection. In these episodes of torment, one thing is revealed: that the most severe critic is none other than one's own self. Perhaps the works encourage us to transcend our own insecurities—to break free from standards that we impose on ourselves from the dictates of society, and to reverse it from within.
Yeo Kaa (b. 1989) studied Advertising at the College of the Holy Spirit Manila, and has won the University of Santo Tomas On-the-Spot Painting Competition and Special Prize of the Metrobank Art and Design Excellence in 2010. She has mounted thirteen solo shows to date in Singapore, Philippines, Indonesia, France and Germany. In 2017, she was an artist-in-residence at Sarang Art Space in Jogjakarta, Indonesia and Arteles Creative Center in Haukijärvi, Finland and in 2018 completed a residency in Berlin, Germany.