Evening

Evening is the first solo exhibition in Malaysia of Singaporean artist Yeo Tze Yang, featuring a series of paintings overcast by dusk and the aesthetic of the moody hours. An undergraduate from the National University of Singapore, Tze Yang earned steady recognition through his commitment to an autodidact practice in painting in Junior College. Parallel to his studies in history and regional cultures, his works are attentive to the existential values of traversing the city. While the mises en scène present in his work are, by context, pictures of Singapore, Tze Yang pays particular honour to how time is applied with a set of codes to living every day in the city. In an ongoing interview with the artist, he defines, “Street lamps, corridor lights, everything is thrown into sharp relief or blurry shadows; emotion is heightened in my eyes, and the brush in my hand tries to depict these sensations as the way I feel or remember them.”

There is a return to the painterly in Tze Yang’s works as both the gaze and sleight of hand of his images capture the fleeting point when the light retracts to signal an end of day, and an end of rote performance. Uncommon to the aesthetics of anaesthetic Singapore, Evening proposes that a shade of darkness and a stroke of density co-exists within spaces that are reckoned to be best seen in the light.