TRUTH BE TOLD:
Recent thotz abt painting ppl
Solo exhibition
Fost Gallery, Singapore
21 May - 23 July 2022
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In his solo exhibition with FOST Gallery, TRUTH BE TOLD: Recent thotz abt painting ppl, painter Yeo Tze Yang marks ten years of professional practice by destabilizing the very genre that defined his early career: street realism.
Historically, Yeo’s work has been viewed as an authentic visual archive of ordinary Singaporean life. However, the works produced between 2020 and 2022 reveal an artist acutely aware of the friction between reality and representation. Prevented from painting subjects face-to-face during the pandemic, Yeo pivoted to a method of painterly collage. His subjects are no longer singular individuals, but synthetic bodies—composites of internet data, stolen glances of masked strangers, and borrowed anatomy. Through this shift, Yeo subverts the traditional contract of portraiture, proposing instead that in a hyper-mediated world, the portrait is always an act of construction.
This tension between the authentic and the fabricated is mirrored in the exhibition’s linguistics. The tongue-in-cheek use of textisms (thotz, abt, ppl) addresses the digitized landscape his subjects navigate. While social media demands a polished, hyper-curated performance of the self, Yeo’s brush isolates the anti-glamorous, the resting, and the mundane. Furthermore, the exhibition expands past the human form to include the lives of animals and discarded objects, treating them with equal painterly gravity.
By layering the gallery walls with personal fragments, sketches, and multilingual aphorisms, TRUTH BE TOLD lays bare the scaffolding of Yeo’s practice, offering a profound reflection on what it means to look at humanity at the end of a digital decade.
Stephanie Fong, Founding Director of FOST Gallery, states:
“I am very pleased to be finally working with Tze Yang. I have been watching his practice ever since he won the Silver Award at the UOB Painting of the Year in 2016. His paintings of everyday life evoke a gamut of human emotions, which go beyond who we are and where we come from.”
Yeo Tze Yang says in 2019:
“I [want] a simplicity to the approach of my paintings, one that didn’t require a deep knowledge of art and art history to understand, but only required the heart; to feel, as that was the very way I approach the paintings too.”
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