anders kølle, ‘poetics of paper’ — on the paper-sculpture artworks of ashley yeo

Anders Kølle, ‘Poetics of Paper’ in On being ridiculous: the power of laughter in philosophy and art

Poetics of Paper
Anders Kølle

The Singaporean artist, Ashley YK Yeo, seems in every possible way out of sync with our time, going up against the collective stream of developments, fashions and tendencies that characterize our present moment: her work is delicate in a time of brutality, her work is slow in a time of massive acceleration, her work is handmade in a time of digitalization, her work is diminutive and reserved in a time of loud effects and of boastful, self-promoting expressions. Her work is, in other words, hopelessly out of touch with the small, unimaginative field that we like to call “reality”; and from this hopelessness, from this strange exile of hers she returns with a paper pearl, she emerges with her fragile paper sculptures and places them before us as signs and letters of a forgotten language — a gesture that would appear naïve, ridiculous even, if it wasn´t so serious, so sincere and so pregnant with poetical reflections and poetical defiance. Over the years she has carefully chosen and perfected the expressive weapons that she now turns against the ills of our time: paper against plastic, arabesques against alienation, presence and contemplative attendance against the superficial and hasty encounters of social life today.

It is a simple, yet significant fact that all her sculptures are handmade, each motif and pattern carefully brought to the fore through a meticulous delineation and selection of cuts. The hand, the paper, the scissor constitute a dynamic triangle in which something hitherto unthinkable becomes perceptible and thinkable for the first time. It is a space of encounters between potentiality and actuality, a balancing act between what is and what could be, between visions and envisions, traversing a field of possibilities as thin as a paper but as deep as an artist´s imagination. In the end a sculpture emerges, a work manifests itself, becomes concrete. But this concretization has a peculiar quality in Yeo´s work. Fragile as it is, constituted of a myriad of tiny punctures and holes, her work doesn´t stand forth with the self-assuredness of a work that securely belongs to this world, a work that has now emerged to claim its rightful place and the public´s admiration and applause, but rather as a hesitant birth, a coming into being that lingers, steps back and forth on a ghostly threshold, neither belonging fully to this world nor truly locatable in another. Like an infant still unsure about its own role and about its proper, physical dimensions it emerges and retreats indecisively before us. Hence it is up to us, the audience, to lure it into this world, to call it into being, to encourage it to take the final step into material and perceptual existence — a process that can only be successful, if we, the audience, call, lure and encourages in the right way: that is, by devoting ourselves fully to the contemplation of the work. There is no middle way, no flimsy attention, no hasty and superficial perception that will achieve this. One has to move close, both in physical and in attentive, phenomenological terms in order to see it. Thus the second peculiar fact about Yeo´s art: her works are small — so small, in fact, that one may very easily miss them. Full of details, as they are, they themselves are not much more than white, snowflake-like details in a world of large and colorful things that constantly call for attention. Her work therefore asks something that many of us, easily distracted citizens of the modern world, almost have forgotten how to give — something that we must now rediscover or re-invent in front of her oeuvre: the meaning of intimacy, the value of integrity, of uncompromised and uncompromising attention. To see her work one must leave one world behind in order to gain another. This is how unwavering Yeo is, how demanding she is and what she whispers to the attentive ear with her voice of sculpted paper.