Yin Yang Poetry by Loh Khee Yew

25 November to 27 November 2017

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Overview

A cube shows 6 faces or 3, if it is solid. Abstraction has its beginning when the artwork goes beyond that of the ‘normal’ form. When a single unbroken line stops where it resembles a cube yet if you were to realise there is uneasiness about the incompleteness, you can continue to extend the line further. This is when the senses take over, and abstraction is birthed by the feelings of the artist. Abstract is infinite. The unseen is a malleable form.

This is ‘yin’ of the passive, dark, feminine, nocturnal; ‘yang’, being male, is active, light, diurnal. The essence of this eastern philosophy explicates the duality in life, medicine, and art. Where the line is ‘yin’ and expresses the feelings of the artist, the background or space is the masculine. In tandem, the work becomes poetry with a relation between feelings and ideas. In art, the unseen is ‘yang’ but there is co-dependency for the balanced state to happen. Looking at paintings for the ‘yin’ and ‘yang’ will show that Van Goghs are usually ‘yin’.

For Loh, there is sound in the cosmic, and there is colour in the cosmic. The cosmic is a plane, its pixels distinguishable by a keen eye, and Loh creates out of this plane. He lets us see the energy in lines and colours. His vision.

Exhibition View

Artist

Loh Khee Yew is an artist and pioneer in design education in Singapore. After studying art, design and advertising at the Alberta College of Art in Canada on a Colombo Plan scholarship in the late ‘60s, he returned in Singapore to work in advertising and subsequently pioneered the design curriculum at LASALLE College of the Arts as the dean of the design faculty from 1992 to 1995. As an adjunct lecturer, he conducted cross cultural studies at the Temasek Polytechnic and life drawing classes at NYU Tisch Asia. Concurrently a practising artist with Joseph McNally’s Group 90 artists’ alliance (an arts group committed to the study and artistic representation of the nude), he retired from teaching in 1996 to focus on art-making. Since then, he has become an established Singapore contemporary artist, known for his unmistakable style and his skill at using calligraphic strokes to illustrate the human body.

Exhitibition Details

Join us for the Official Opening of Yin Yang Poetry on 25 Nov, at 3pm and meet the artist Loh Khee Yew.

This 10th solo exhibition by Loh Khee Yew on the unseen energy is a series of prints expressing the seismic which is the tremors as growth takes place in a tree, its capillaries or vessels carry the nutrients that cannot be seen by the naked eye. There is energy moving as life in the tree, its ‘yang’.

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