A girl by any other name

BIñAN, Laguna, Philippines  â€” Meeting 23-year-old painter Yeo Kaa (not her real name) is meeting a persona, like TAFKAP. “I just never really liked being called by my real name because I’m not comfortable,” she says. Yeo is her last name, her kohl-opened eyes betray, and Kaa is from her first name, part of which is Kat, like her feline postures as we take portraits in her studio’s garage. It is a space she shares with the internationally renowned painter Lynyrd Paras, to whom she is both muse and apprentice.

She is almost like a little girl, and when one looks at her paintings, the vibrant Lolitas appear only to be beginning to discover their own adolescent bodies. “I didn’t used to use colors,” she says. “They were all black and white.” But today, it’s an explosion, a (sometimes literal) puke, a bunch of smudges, of pigments and textures. At the same time, they are drawn with careful outlining, layering, and studies in contrast. “It’s like when people tell you, ‘You’re so happy!’ but they don’t really know what’s inside you,” she says. It can be all bright and sunny, like her favorite The Marvelous Misadventures of Flapjack on Cartoon Network. On the other hand, it has the vibe of her favorite manga, Nana, the world of young girls confused with growing up while living the hedonist rock ‘n’ roll lifestyle.

It has the lively thrill akin to another manga, 20th Century Boys, which has become an initiatory watch to the members of the art collective she’s co-organizing, Studio 1616. What originally began as a hangout for art students in its numbersake address in Pandacan, Manila became an official art collective of up-and-coming artists organizing group shows, that has so far have them booked with eight shows until the end of 2013.

It is a proper exploratory venue, and she is showing a very distinct style that would be very welcome in a future solo show in one of the galleries she has so far showed work at: the street art-oriented Secret Fresh, the contemporary Boston Art Gallery and Light and Space, and even the institutional CCP. “I started developing this style while doing a trapunto exercise, like what (painter) Pacita Abad does.”

From a College of the Holy Spirit student who took up art because she didn’t pass the course supposed to gear her for law, and one who failed her painting class at that, she has blossomed into a promising addition to an art scene more and more dominated by abstraction and the conceptual. “When painting and you want to make something new,” she says, “You draw from experience… It’s so easy to paint something cute without any content. I used to work that way. You’ll look at it and think, ‘It’s beautiful!’ but not feel anything and then walk away. Now I get people asking, ‘What is happening to this character?’”

* * *

Check out her work at yeokaa.com