YEO KAA

Through Don’t Worry About Me! I’m Just Passing By! Yeo Kaa highlights the pressurizing societal standards and aspirations we inflict upon ourselves. The exhibition reminds us of the basic reality of life’s transience and the inevitability of passage to oblivion. Though rendered in the artist’s signature candy-coloured palette, we see the vividness of the images fading and blurring, as if they are fleeting impressions gradually disappearing before our eyes. In these works, she portrays crowds on a train ride, digital drawings take cues from the ubiquitous ads and billboards that captures the ephemeral sights and encounters we experience in the daily commute as a fitting metaphor for names, places, and events that would all be eventually forgotten.

Don’t Worry About Me! I’m Just Passing By! confronts the burden and attempts to liberate our thoughts from the preoccupation with establishing an indelible presence. Yeo Kaa’s works have mostly dealt with the inner demons that torment individuals, at times navigating the dark and macabre, imagined in a vivid fantasy world that disguises sinister themes or suggests irony – though the gift of being present in the moment is precious, any attempt to cast an imprint of permanence is a silly fallacy.

ABOUT THE ARTIST

A perfect dichotomy of colour and torment, Filipino artist YeoKaa(b. 1989) paints deceptively candy-coloured characters stuck in violent states of reality. Her stylised figuration brings to mind animation and fictional characters from children’s books, a fantasy world that exists only in dreams and imagination. Yet these elements cleverly camouflage haunting and daring images: a tableau reminiscent of a crime scene, decapitated and dismembered bodies, or an insane person out of a killing spree. Such provocative combination of contrasting temperaments may well refer to a world full of contradictions, a world where darker tendencies of human nature are masked by misleading façades and are lurking beneath pleasant veneers.

Yeo Kaa 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 ten solo shows to date in Singapore, Philippines, Indonesia 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.