Bubblelloon

Bubblelloon

WHEN
15 January – 6 March 2021
VENUE
The Columns Gallery, Gillman Barracks, 22 Lock Road, #01-35 (go to Google maps)
OPENING HOURS
Tues – Fri, 11am – 7pm
Sat, 12pm – 6pm
Sun, by appointment only
Closed on Mon & PH
ADMISSION
Free Admission
WEBSITE
http://columnsgallery.com

Bubblelloon

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 elements under the umbrella of A Beauty Centre project in 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 the production quality of each object. The sculptor too is on a quest for beauty.

Yeo Chee Kiong, Shopping, 2014. Image courtesy of the artist.