For “Learning from Trees,” an exhibition at Art Forum Gallery in Singapore in 2013, Yeo tied strings to the ends of her brushes, creating clumsy painterly marionettes that she lashed to the limbs of breeze-blown trees, causing the ink-loaded brushes to skip and bounce across the surfaces of her works. Most of Yeo’s experiments with unconventional tools remove her hand from her work with the same inventive playfulness exhibited by her use of toy robots. Yeo’s art marries the aesthetics of Chinese ink painting to the chance-oriented processes found in mid-century American modernism and contemporary generative digital art, reimagining ancient traditions in a practice defined by relentless experimentation and innovation. The car was driven by John Cage, whose pioneering work with aleatoric musical composition also informs Yeo’s philosophy and techniques. Yeo’s performative painting process recalls Pollock’s athletic artistry, but the robot paintings also echo Robert Rauschenberg’s Automobile Tire Print (1953)-a monoprint of a paint-covered tire treads made by driving a car over twenty sheets of paper taped together by the artist. Her robots cruise and crash through the ink, creating lyrical loops and lashing lines. It is one of several devices that Yeo set loose on the canvas to encourage the show’s titular collisions. Yeo has gone even further, removing the brush from her hand entirely, and inventing other strategies to generate random outcomes.Īt the 1:23 mark in the YouTube video, a little white robot that looks like a scrub brush scoots across a wet, inky surface. Pollock’s brush rarely touches the canvas as he applies layers of his signature splashes and drips to the work. The video instantly recalls Hans Namuth and Paul Falkenberg’s iconic short documentary Jackson Pollock 51 (1951) which captures the eponymous painter pivoting, bending, slouching, and marching around a canvas spread out in his backyard in East Hampton. Yeo spreads the ink blobs across the canvas using a straw broom, a floor scraper, and a long palette knife.

Then she bounces up, takes a few steps, and makes a half-turn before bending at the waist and pouring another run of ink that’s long and bent and looks like a tree branch wet with rain. She crouches near one corner and pours a generous arc of the stuff across the canvas.

Yeo fills a plastic cup with black ink before circling a large, blank, stretched canvas laid flat on the floor. There’s a video on Shih Yun Yeo’s YouTube channel that documents the artist working on her exhibition “Creative Collisions” at Singapore’s Galerie Steph in 2014.

Yeo portrait painter