Yeo Tze Yang
“One Day, I Hope I Don’t Need To Take The MRT Anymore”: Reflections on public transport and class in Singapore
Passengers seated, waiting, dreaming; glowing LED signboards; traffic lights through rain-streaked windows. With generous streaks of paint, Yeo Tze Yang builds up images of ordinary people caught in moments of introspection. Deliberately leaving idiosyncratic brushstrokes visible on his canvases, he defamiliarizes scenes of daily life — even as he portrays them with unflinching realism.
In “One Day, I Hope I Don’t Need To Take The MRT Anymore”, Tze Yang observes the prevailing perceptions around car ownership as representations of success and status, despite the quality of Singapore’s public transport system and the high prohibitive costs of car ownership. Through Yeo Tze Yang’s paintings of everyday scenes on buses and trains, he hints at the complex dynamics underlying our perceptions of public transportation, and prompts us to question the underlying biases we hold.
You are invited to join the artist in a creative workshop to create an artwork about your commutes on public transport. By paying closer attention and documenting your everyday journeys, this workshop will prompt you to reconsider your personal memories and experiences with Singapore’s public transport system, and reflect on wider questions around class, mobility and sustainability.
Artist Bio
Yeo Tze Yang is a visual artist with a primary focus on representational painting, investigating the human experience through depictions of the unnoticed; observing people, places and objects in his immediate surroundings. As a self-taught painter of daily life, he sees his practice as an opportunity to explore, question and toy with the orthodoxies and expectations of him as a figurative painter. Yeo was conferred the UOB Painting of the Year, Silver Award in 2016. His works have been exhibited extensively in Singapore and regionally in Malaysia, the Philippines and Indonesia. His works are part of the collections of National University of Singapore and UOB, as well as private collections in Singapore, Malaysia, Thailand, the Philippines, Australia, Switzerland, Denmark, Italy, the United Kingdom, and the United States.
Take part at home
On your daily commutes on public transport, take pictures of the things that pique your interest.
Maybe it’s the way an old man is napping at his seat. Maybe it’s the way the aunty grips her handbag. Maybe it’s the Candy Crush game on her phone. Maybe it’s the way the train doors close. Maybe it’s the architecture of the MRT station. Maybe it’s the view of your neighbourhood as your train reaches your stop. Maybe it’s the view outside the bus window of the different strangers waiting at the bus stop.
When you get home, load these pictures onto your computer. Reflect on each image. Which ones felt more significant than others? Write these thoughts down. Think about what makes you connect most with that image. Crop the images to what feels best to you. Edit the colours and lighting if you wish.
Choose three images. These three images should feel significant enough that you would want to spend some time making an artwork out of them. When you are ready, pick the image you connect with the most, and start creating the artwork. Feel free to distort, omit, add, imagine elements in the artwork. Maybe you want to exaggerate the way the man in his SAF uniform walks. Maybe you want to change the colours of the lighting in the walkway of the MRT station to reflect how you feel about the place. Do as you please.