MANILA, Philippines - Melancholy and anxiety don’t always have to leave us so blue and gray all the time — sometimes they can have the opposite, as with Yeo Kaa’s latest outing at Art Informal.
The main gallery of Art Informal serves as the cathartic pace-setter where she unleashes her anxieties and personal struggles through her new paintings. She continues to give us a dose of her vibrant and multicolored universe animated with doll-like characters in domestic settings — from a bedroom to a kitchen — and rendered with a saccharine veneer.
Kaa goes further into her mind and reflects on her own set of frustrations and confusions. Bright hues of pink, magenta and yellow set the mood as seemingly uplifting — yet there are images of characters burning, shedding tears and wallowing in their misery. It’s an atypical reimagining of such scenarios. They all seem like splendidly colored reveries, and this becomes the pull of these images. While they have a certain kind of allure, they also elicit repulsion.
The titles of the works themselves are revelatory. For instance, one painting is titled “I’ll Never Be A Wife or A Mother… I’m Too Selfish to be One,” which directs us into the artist’s own set of frustrations about being a woman and not fitting into preconceived societal norms. She shares such things like “You’re not a woman if you’re childless” or you need the whole domesticated package to be considered a real woman. It extends to other works like “No One Wants To Be With Somebody Who Doesn’t Do Anything But Paint,” “Lonely Nights Tell You The Harshest Words,” “Drowning Myself To Sleep,” to name a few. Her existential meanderings take us further with other works like “You Only Have Yourself.”
Altogether, it’s a refreshing perspective — a female artist in her mid 20s taking a brooding look into her own struggles while offering a bit of irony on the surface. Behind the bright candy colors is a dynamic turmoil that fuels her modes of self-expression. It’s much like the name of her latest show — “Okay.” Everything seems all right on the surface, but take a closer look, and you’ll see that things are not so pastel perfect.
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Yeo Kaa’s solo exhibition “Okay” runs from Aug. 13 to Sept. 12 at the main gallery of Art Informal, 277 Connecticut Street, Greenhills East, Mandaluyong City, Philippines. For information, visit yeokaa.com.