The Emotional Show

Born in Singapore, Yek Wong was sent abroad for his education by a father who wanted his sons to become cosmopolitan. In 1990, after rejecting the possibility of an engineering degree, he decided to study art at the University of Texas in Austin – “a very traditional, narrative school,” he told the Los Angeles Times ten years later. Wanting a change of pace after graduation, he relocated to Las Vegas and earned an MFA at UNLV, where he began to separate himself from some of the ideas that he had learned in Texas. All of the easily-recognized objects in his work were gradually replaced by abstract floods of modulated color, and he removed the word "Wong" from his signature so that people would stop “reading my background into my work.” Later, in the 2000s, he returned to Singapore. “The best work, in my opinion, is abstract and ambiguous," he says.