Artist Talk, Beyond 无边 2025

Beyond 无边 is a two-person exhibition that brings the work of Boo Sze Yang and Yeo Shih Yun together for the first time, creating a novel conversation between two artists whose work speaks to the antique – even ancient – past as well as to this metamodern moment in contemporary art. The display showcases innovative mark-making and painterly expression through the sometimes surprising use of unconventional tools and techniques. 

Boo Sze Yang employs the squeegee devices you see in screen printing shops or ceramics studios to make his colorful abstract paintings. Boo uses various squeegees to spread, swirl and splash oil paint across paper and canvas. Using these tools and techniques, Boo creates marks and textured surfaces that evoke printmaking effects, blending the tactile quality of the printing processes with the fluidity of oil paint. “The Crossing #1” looks purely abstract at first glance, but can also be thought of as an abstract landscape. The slanted lines and colorful parallelograms at the bottom of the piece look infrastructural and architectural. The gooey blue and white smears that make-up the upper part of the painting appear as sky and clouds, even snow and ice. Boo’s work comments on the displacement of the natural world by urban development, and his formally gorgeous surfaces only make their content more engaging. 

Yeo Shih Yun has a reputation for innovation. Her experimental ink paintings connect ancient Asian calligraphic traditions to 21st century technology, and she’s best known for utilizing mechanically designed tools such as robots and other devices as painting assistants. For Beyond 无边, Yeo deploys robots that were fabricated using 3D printing. Yeo’s artsy droids make the first random, expressive marks and designs for the works in her Beyond the Visible series. The robots’ contributions are photographed before they’re printed on transparent neon yellow fiberglass using reverse UV printing technology. The finished works are sculptural, but also graphic as well as painterly. They’re literally machine-made, but still expressive and enigmatic.

Beyond 无边 offers a vibrant dialogue between the two artists as they engage viewers – and one another – in the space between figuration and abstraction. The display prompts a discussion about rethinking art categories, redefining art practices, and reconsidering the roles of new technologies and age-old traditions in contemporary visual art. Most importantly, the show creates a conversation about what painting has been and what it may become in this new century.

About the Artists

\ Boo Sze Yang \

Boo’s paintings deal with a broad range of subject matters, from mundane domestic objects to images of car and airplane crash-scenes, derelict interiors of cathedrals and unpeopled chambers of shopping malls. Boo treats banal objects, modern architectural interiors and destructive scenes as metaphors for the human condition. His series of semi-abstract paintings conjure a natural world gradually dissected and displaced by urban development. The monochromatic handling of linear structures resembling scaffoldings, partitions and platforms are created through the delicate process of pulling and pushing wet paints across the canvas using a squeegee. These imageries do not evoke real moments of memories but refers to a special, in-between zone of the real space and the utopia; a baffling place where reality and fantasy coexist. In his portraiture series, Boo integrates his personal experiences with everyday’s social and political events to generate uncanny and idiosyncratic expressionistic portraitures serving as comic observations in our everyday life.

Boo Sze Yang graduated from the Nanyang Academy of Fine Arts (NAFA) in 1991; completed his Postgraduate Diploma in Fine Art at the University of Reading, UK in 1995 and received his Master’s in Arts Degree from Chelsea College of Art & Design, the University of the Arts London in 2004.

\ Yeo Shih Yun \

Yeo Shih Yun (1976, Singapore) is a highly regarded Singaporean artist whose innovative approach to ink painting has garnered international acclaim. After obtaining a Bachelor degree in Business Administration from the National University of Singapore in 1998, Yeo pursued a Diploma in Communication Design at LASALLE-SIA College of the Arts in 2001, followed by the Post Baccalaureate Programme in painting at the San Francisco Art Institute in 2002.

Yeo's experimental fusion of traditional ink painting with contemporary mediums such as new media and performance art has resulted in dynamic and unpredictable works that challenge conventional notions of the medium. Her unique creative process has earned her recognition, including a 2011 commission by the Singapore Art Museum and the People's Choice Award for "Conversations with trees," which was nominated for Sovereign Asian Art Prize Finalists in 2012 and auctioned by Christie's Asia. She has also won the UOB Painting of the Year Competition (Distinction in Abstract category) twice, in 1999 and 2007.

Yeo has held exhibitions in major cities including Singapore, Hong Kong, Taipei, Shanghai, Tokyo, and New York, and has completed numerous commissions, including National Gallery Singapore's "My Ink-credible Adventure" and her solo exhibition at Esplanade, titled "Chance Encounters," in 2021. Her groundbreaking works have been showcased in "Generative Art and the Future," hosted by Poly Auction China, and she participated in the "NFTs + The Ever-Evolving World of Art" Tezos exhibition at Art Basel Hong Kong in May 2022. Yeo was also invited to participate in the "Digital Baroque" exhibition and auction curated by 4ART NFT+ marketplace and minted on Palm network.

Yeo's innovative approach to ink art has made a significant impact on the development of the medium both in Singapore and internationally. Her contributions to the art world have been widely recognized and she continues to push the boundaries of the medium with her unique approach and experimental techniques.

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