Discover Yeo Chee Kiong - Organic sculptures

Yeo Chee Kiong was born in 1970 in Malaysia. After graduated of the Nanyang Academy of Fine Arts and Glasgow School of Art in the UK, Yeo received the National Young Artist Award in 2006. He is an award-winning sculptor known for his inspiring and unique works that feature often playful and unexpected juxtapositions. His sculptural incursion includes serial works with conceptual narratives. Many of them have attracted critical attention and have won several national awards. In 2010, his work The Wind & Wings was honored with Heritage sculpture for the Singapore Youth Olympic Games.
"I came across the sculpture by accident. I have always been good in drawing and painting, and in my second year at the Academy of Fine Arts in Nanyang I opted for the major in sculpture. Yeo Chee Kiong tackles different themes but the one of predilection is the human in its most organic and poetic form. The beauty of the man is then highlighted. The artist questions her. While the general public could easily relate beauty to art, beauty is however scorned, ridiculed and rejected in an artistic world dominated by Western ideals. After conceptual art in the West denounced sensory pleasures to extol the ideas and immateriality of the art object in the 1960s, one might be superficial in talking about beauty in their creative endeavors. As Arthur Danto, a prominent critic of American art, describes, "beauty had almost entirely disappeared from artistic reality in the twentieth century, as if attractiveness was a stigma, with its gross commercial implications." (Danto, 2003). In Chinese philosophy, "beauty" is associated with "truth" and "good".

Yeo Chee Kiong explores all the abilities of matter to arrive at a result where the sculpture twists, expands, rises. His rounded, quirky sculptures call for reverie, for poetry. Also unlike contemporary artists who reject "objets d'art" as a means of disseminating information; Yeo Chee Kiong claims to be more of a sculptor than a conceptual artist; in the sense that for this artist matter predominates over the idea and that the medium precedes its meaning.

"I chose sculpture because it was extremely difficult. Sculpture takes time, effort and patience. I realized that if I spent enough time and dedication to my job, I was getting better by leaps and bounds, which I found very rewarding. And I like to feel things and work with my hands. "