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Art review: Sculptor Yeo Chee Kiong is mad for beauty

SINGAPORE — You see them everywhere: “Beauty Centres” hawking their trade with advertisements in newspapers, on public transport, or blaring out from mall screens. Beauty, they assure us, is well within reach, though not via something as simple as eating right and exercising once in a while. No, beauty, they claim, is attained by forking out cash and undergoing all manner of beauty treatments such as wraps, massages, and scientific-sounding gizmos.

SINGAPORE — You see them everywhere: “Beauty Centres” hawking their trade with advertisements in newspapers, on public transport, or blaring out from mall screens. Beauty, they assure us, is well within reach, though not via something as simple as eating right and exercising once in a while. No, beauty, they claim, is attained by forking out cash and undergoing all manner of beauty treatments such as wraps, massages, and scientific-sounding gizmos.

While art often looks to more rarefied notions of beauty, these institutions seem to be one of the inspirations behind award-winning sculptor Yeo Chee Kiong’s latest exhibition, A Beauty Centre.

Upon entering the gallery space, you’ll find the gallery staff behind an appropriately lurid counter, accompanied by signage and brochures which look to mimic the aesthetic of the neighbourhood beauty centre, but on steroids. There’s lots of pink, for one thing. It’s here that you might be enjoined to participate in the exhibition, through a “beauty centre membership” which might find its way into future iterations of the project.

Beyond this point, the exhibition consists largely of more or less self-contained tableaux, each revolving around a specific aspect of our society’s relentless obsession with perfection. Each section is marked by a scrolling LED sign, displaying such frantic exhortations as: “Advanced Incredible Implant System,” or “We Stop Time | Irresistible Youth”. Due to safety regulations, each of these is accompanied by a standard illuminated exit sign, which somehow seems like something out of one of Terry Gilliam’s films.

Unintentional or not, this play on the factuality of infrastructural signage is borne out again in the similar profusion of signs asking visitors not to touch the artworks. They’re in the exact same style as the signs warning us that A Day Without A Tree — a work in epoxy resembling distorted parquet flooring — is in fact a spill of some sort. It’s a welcome bit of ambiguity, but one that is rather spoilt by the inclusion of an animated slideshow depicting an earlier version of the artwork at the National Museum. It’s educational, and informative, but within the scene staged by the exhibition, it’s unpleasantly jarring.

A Day Without A Tree, great as it may be, seems a little out of place amongst the rest of the artworks, which revolve, for the most part, around blobular abstractions of the female form, cast in polished steel or pink resin. In various attitudes and poses — doing a bit of yoga, getting massaged by some carnivalesque torture device — these disquieting sculptures simultaneously suggest the venereal horror of David Cronenberg, and some whimsical sense of ethereal lightness.

Though generally billed as a solo exhibition, a considerable portion of the gallery space is given over to the soft, knit sculptures of Ruth Barker. As much as there might be correspondences between these body-oriented, performance-activated sculptures, they seem egregious in context. Similarly, the shelf display of the Soul Shopping Lifeboxes, displayed alongside a number of maquettes and small works, contribute to an overall sense of overcrowding to the exhibition. Though it seems at first to be a concept-driven, multi-part installation, elements of the retrospective and the artist collaboration bleed through, an over-reach which doesn’t serve the otherwise outstanding individual elements of the exhibition. 

A Beauty Centre runs until May 15, 11am and 7pm, at the Ngee Ann Kongsi Galleries 1 & 2, Nanyang Academy of Fine Arts, 80 Bencoolen Street. Free admission.

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