Yeo Shih Yun’s Journey with ink, brush, pigments and silkscreen
Yeo Shih Yun’s art journey is filled with dynamism. Her success as an artist is due to her focused love for the brush, ink, silkscreen technique and nature.
In 2003, I was so impressed by Yeo Shih Yun’s vibrant brush strokes that I immediately invited her to show at Art Gallery Association Singapore Group Show ‘New Finds’. Her work is refreshing and easily understood by all.
Since then Shih Yun visited my gallery often; we talked about works by artists whom she admired: the style of the late Chua Ek Kay (Singapore), Toko Shinoda (Japan).
Shih Yun admires "the basic yet strong quality of black as a colour, its boldness and infinite possibilities". So obsessed by the movement of ink, Shih Yun
Merged traditional ink with Abstract Expressionism
Dabbled in unorthodox methods of transferring ink onto white surface using rollerblades, toy guns and watering cans.
She even filled a toy robot with ink and drove it around by remote control and observed the effect of the spilled ink on paper. With those, Shih Yun was still not satisfied by her experiments because whatever she did the results still meant that she was in control, whether moving a robot or gliding a roller blade.
In 2007 Shih Yun took up studies at the San Francisco Art Institute when she learnt silkscreen and ‘loved it’.
Her favourite artists are John Cage and Robert Rauschenberg, especially Rauschenbert's ‘Automobile Tire Print’
Remembering her time in Japan when she interacted with ‘nature’ Shih Yun hit upon an idea to tie a brush to a branch of a tree and allow the breeze to ‘apply’ ink from the brush onto paper. Thereafter she applied her knowledge of printing and transferred the ‘brush images’ created by trees and breeze into silkscreen. Thus began the ‘Conversation with Trees’ series, which was presented in Singapore Art Museum in 2012.
Now that I have brought Yeo Shih Yun’s journey up to the present, you will see very subtle yet major breakthrough in Shih Yun’s works (2016-2017)
While Shih Yun’s powerful brush strokes are still evident in her work, she translated them into silkscreen: layers of colour support the background to the screened brush strokes. This added new depth and dimension into her composition.
Congratulations, Shih Yun!