Yeo Chee Kiong

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.    

Bubblelloon Series is a sculpture project focusing on the modern sculpture form with fine craftsmanship of forged stainless-steel and bronze cast. It aims to search for a perfect combination between the conceptual approach of contemporary subject matter together with the most refined metalwork in sculpture making of our time. 

“It is obvious that Yeo's earlier declaration to work with only the formless elemental forces of nature is thwarted by the continuing desire to create the human form: the sculptor succumbs, and we are witness to a collision of forces and forms, e.g., the molecular structure of vaporous water crashing and condensing into a semblance of human female form – water vapour held together and incorporated as somehow female, just as clouds sensuously sculpt our imaginations. What influences the shape of the experience of A Beauty Centre seems to be these repeated collisions of the sculptor's twin obsessions: the beauty of the natural phenomenon of water as formless force and the culturally-shaped human form, where both forces and forms are invoked, yoked, and incarnated as art. And while art may be a quest for beauty and what beauty can be, the artist is aware that the beautiful in Nature just is.”

 Dr Susie Lingnam 

Director, Singapore Art Museum (2013-2016)

'A Day Without A Tree' at the National Museum of Singapore, was originally a site-specific conceptual artwork set to challenge the mundane and biased everyday perception, and by extension put the pre-determined and pre-established institutions to test. The installation work intentionally transformed the most prominent area (rotunda/entrance) of the historic building and disrupts its authoritativeness by “melting” it, and bewildered the viewers with the subtly altered architectural features and the strange existence of uncanny objects.

Teleporting Ng Eng Teng is an art project conceived to materialize the digital portrait of the local Pioneer sculptor Mr Ng Eng Teng within the show space over a period of two months. With a set of six 3D printing machines representing the Teleporting Machine Formation, the late Sculptor will be brought back to our physical world from the digital dimension. The project aims to showcase a multi-layer conceptual approach in the application of state-of-art digital tools in contemporary sculpture making, such as the VR presentation of 3D scanned sculpture of Eng Teng from The Teng Collection, the construction of digital portrait of Eng Teng through VR tools, and the animated presentation of his digital portrait on 2D and 3D Hologram (Looking Glass).

 The word “chair” cannot be found in Thailand’s ancient language. The Thai people in ancient times sat on the floor. Chairs were non-existent then because they did not serve any practical purpose in the Thai people’s daily lives. The demand for function leads to the production of tools and objects. The coining of new words establishes the object’s form and its practical use which is rooted in daily experience. Humanistic fields in different times and spaces have derived multiple styles of the same object, (and functionality is what defines the name of the object.) Therefore, if a table has the look of a table but does not have the function of a table, unable to contain anything on its top, is it still a table? Will this become another classic chicken and egg paradox? The non-existent “chair” in ancient Thai language also indirectly transcends the “chair” described in Joseph Kosuth's classic three-definition rhetoric, as well as its related image interpretation and annotated function of a chair. This leaves the quintessential discourse of contemporary conceptual art in a specific form of cultural dialectic and coding framework within civilization.