Yeo Tze Yang (born 1994, Singapore) is a visual artist with a primary interest in painting everyday life. He has been conferred the Silver Award of UOB Painting of the Year in 2016, and held his third solo exhibition, A Lack of Significance, in 2019 at iPreciation, Singapore. A self taught painter, his paintings often depict the unnoticed and bypassed people, places and objects of his immediate surroundings. Avoiding contemporary conceptual approaches to art, he instead reverts back to a more direct and emotive approach to painting.
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Having graduated from the National University of Singapore as a Southeast Asian Studies major, Yeo is deeply interested in issues pertaining to the region and the subject matter of his artworks are derived from across the region. His interest in Southeast Asian studies includes issues of race, nationalism and difference, especially in Malaysia and Singapore. His university dissertation was an ethnographic and oral historical piece on issues of race, nationhood, modernity, collective memory and nostalgia, between Johor (Malaysia) and Singapore. Parallel to his artistic practice, Yeo is deeply interested in the intersection points between politics and the everyday lives of ordinary people.
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The result of such a process is an accumulation of images, thoughts, emotions, stories and memories, that in turn become allegories of both the artist’s life and the stories that his audiences weave into his works. Yeo’s works are collected in Singapore, Malaysia, the Philippines, Australia, Denmark, the United Kingdom, and the United States and in the UOB collection.