IN THE STUDIO with Leonard Yang
JUNE 2022, VISUAL ARTS
At Millay Arts, we love when creators from abroad come to Steepletop. Leonard is our first visual artist from Singapore to be awarded a Core Residency. Working on new paintings in preparation for an exhibition back home (Your Mother Gallery on August 20th), we asked him to share a bit about his work, his process and the art scene in Singapore. HAPPY READING!
My foray into painting began with photography. I studied photography and digital imaging at Nanyang Technological University, Singapore (BFA 2015). It was there that I realize I enjoyed painting and pushing color around (but I wasn’t very good at rendering anything realistically – both in digital or physical form!). I studied painting under Martin Constable, a painter, animator, and very skilled Photoshop user. I dabbled in mixed media that utilized painting, digital editing, and photography. My interests back then were layering glazes of paint laced with medium on top of photographs and observing how the color interacted with the grayscale tones of the prints and transformed darkness into luminescence. Looking back, the strange ghostly characteristics in the paintings I created at Millay could either be a by-product of these ethereal experiments just as likely as they could be spiritual visitations.
When Trees Grow Over Cities, 2016 (exhibited at Mizuma Gallery, Singapore) Oil on Inkjet Print on Canvas, 30" x 48” each
Fast forward several years and I was a graduate student in the Parsons Fine Art program (MFA 2019). It was there that I met Tom Butter who was my core faculty for a semester. A hallmark of Tom’s studio visits included these very detailed observations that he would pen down in an email to each student at the end of every session. I think I inherited some of Tom’s sensibility towards how marks communicate – I learnt to pay particular attention to the little nuances across each of my paintings. Even the paintings I did not like, and how they could be, given time and some deep introspective looking, transformed into something that could excite both me and the viewer. Tom and I kept in touch after I returned to Singapore in 2020. I knew he had a studio somewhere upstate, and I wrote to him enthusiastically upon news of my residency at Millay.
When we arrived at Hudson, Jackie Branson picked us up from the station and gave us a ride up into the Millay campus. Jackie was a sculptor, and out of pure coincidence, the first person we had a conversation about in the car was Tom! I found out that Tom was a Visiting Artist when Jackie was at the Chautauqua School of Art and he had just as much an impact on her practice as he did mine. Very soon, we made plans for a 3 hour drive out west to pay Tom a visit. On our drive, we passed through all the beauty nature had to offer to the Hudson Valley. It was fascinating to see the bee hives that Tom Butter and Lucy Pullen had in their garden and the agriculture building which they have fashioned into a live-work space!
We drove through a full rainbow on the way back from Tom and Lucy’s studio.
At Millay, I was mesmerized by the quiet charm of the woods, meadows, hills, and valleys that surrounded the property. I would take long walks in the mornings and bring my canvasses out during the day to paint. I wanted to experiment and discover new ways of working that did not feel encumbering or burdensome and the vast open landscape that Millay offered was perfect for that. Millay offered me the solace of working both amongst the outdoors and an indoor studio that felt incredibly liberating.
Eventually, I started utilizing free association to weave together elements from the surrounding landscape and wildlife with my subconscious thoughts and dreams as well as the actual events that happened during my time there. The series of paintings that I made revealed strange spiritual visitations, humanoid figures in contorted and manic poses, and fleeting hints of violence, flight, and escape.
TOP — Road Trip, 2022, Oil on Canvas, 30" x 48”
BOTTOM — Rip Your Face, 2022, Oil on Canvas, 22" x 28”
On the other hand, the paintings that I made in Singapore relied heavily on imagery. It reached a point where I got tired of looking at images on a computer screen while painting! And I think it shows in the work too. Somehow I felt burdened and encumbered. Singapore is a very “heavy” and unforgiving society, one where simple misdeeds are punished and there is an unspoken social pressure to conform.
I think that this “heaviness” and “encumbered-ness” had made its way into the series of paintings, Helicopter Country that I painted earlier in the year before beginning my residency at Millay. The figures in those paintings, while performing gestures and pose that are seemingly mundane, hint at expressions of frustration, anxiety, confusion, and fear. While they contain architectural elements from familiar sights such as apartment blocks, parks and playgrounds, malls and skyscrapers (which I had to utilize images for!), the perspective employed hints at a surreal and dystopian world, one where repression is rampant and things are not as vibrant and colorful as the colors they were employed to resemble.
The Futility of Living, 2022
Oil on Canvas, 30” x 48”
Stockholm Syndrome, 2022
Oil on Canvas, 40” x 58”
Helicopter Country will be shown at Your Mother Gallery, an artist’s run gallery in Singapore. It’s a one-of-a-kind art space run by Jeremy Hiah, a veteran artist in the Singapore scene. A large part of the scene in Singapore consists of cultural institutions and commercial galleries. There are only a handful of artist run spaces and most of these are newly opened by young artists in the past 5-10 years. Jeremy has been running this space since 2004! Jeremy has a bedroom and studio in one room, and the living area is converted into a gallery where he presents exhibitions of emerging artists. The kitchen is where the magic happens. Jeremy has been hailed by many as a good cook, where he would often whip up local delicacies such as curry or wintermelon soup which he generously serves to guests. This combination of art and home-cooked food is what brings people together!
TOP — The kitchen table in Jeremy’s apartment that is also part of Your Mother Gallery. Left to right: Leonard Yang, Gertrude Tan, Jeremy Hiah. Photo by Angie Sim (bottom right).
BOTTOM — Jeremy Hiah (left) in a performance at the gallery.
To learn more about Singapore’s art scene, see ARTnews July 28, 2022.