Boo Sze Yang

Boo Sze Yang’s paintings deal with a broad range of subject matters and styles, from mundane domestic objects to images of car and airplane crash-scenes, derelict interiors of cathedrals and unpeopled chambers of shopping malls. Boo treats banal objects, modern architectural interiors and destructive scenes as metaphors for the human condition. His series of semi-abstract paintings conjure a natural world gradually dissected and displaced by urban development. The monochromatic handling of linear structures resembling scaffoldings, partitions and platforms are created through the delicate process of pulling and pushing wet paints across the canvas using a squeegee.

These imageries do not evoke real moments of memories but refers to a special, in-between zone of the real space and the utopia; a baffling place where reality and fantasy coexist. In his latest figurative paintings, Boo reframes his subjects through dark humour and an exaggerated theatricality to probe our perception of truth and reality. A key feature in these paintings is men in business suits wearing gas masks, with dramatic coloured patterned backgrounds. The business suit is a symbol of class, privilege and power, while the gas mask symbolizes death and destruction.