In the contemporary society, this sensitive concept is much politicized, and often associated with women, the media, and the commercial world. In the world of contemporary art, the idea is equally if not more prickly. While the general public might easily relate beauty to art, beauty is however much disdained, derided, and dismissed in an art world where western ideals dominate. After conceptual art in the West had denounced sensory pleasures to extol instead, ideas and immateriality of the art object in the 1960s, one risks being superficial when speaking about beauty and their creative endeavors. As the preeminent American art critic Arthur Danto describes, “beauty had almost entirely disappeared from artistic reality in the twentieth century, as if attractiveness was a stigma, with its crass commercial implications”. (Danto, 2003)
Despite the controversies, the pursuits for beauty in history are intriguingly perpetual and relentless. Even the art world did not manage to cleanly sever ties with it.
With an intention to provoke the ideas surrounding “beauty”, A Beauty Centre is constructed as a twofold world where the retail saloon industry and the art gallery as an institution overlaps and meets. On one hand, there is the rather mischievous mimicry of a retail space; on the other there is the actuality of the art exhibition itself taking place within the gallery compound. The two worlds collapse into one as the system of the saloon as a site for the negotiation of beauty for vanity slips into the framework of a gallery where the audience is consuming sensuous objects created by the artist. By juxtaposing the two, the artist poses questions and manifests the hidden affinity between the beauty business and the art world.
In Chinese philosophy “beauty” is associated with “truth” and “goodness”. In Plato’s Symposium, “beauty” is further taken to be the ultimate object of “love". The pursuit has its root in human’s carnal wants, but concludes itself by embracing the remote “form” of things that are beautiful. In the art world, contemporary writers lament that this idea of beauty as the “object of love”, has been significantly diminished in 20th century art (Nehamas, 2007). In A Beauty Centre, with a series of quirky forms situated within a staged environment, it is interesting to see the artist’s apparent fascination with form, materiality, and space. In his own words, he wishes to “explore our primal desire for material and spiritual satisfaction within the absurd world of delusion.” (Yeo, 2015)
Arthur Danto once proposed for “a detoxification of beauty in contemporary art” contends that works of art are capable of embodying “beauty” that operates from within its own conceptual framework (Danto, 2002). A Beauty Centre may be seen as an ambitious project with an agenda comparable to this idea. Complete with a pseudo parlor, an online counterpart, and the operation of the entire scheme as an art show, the exhibition not only makes enquiries into the notions of beauty in various dimensions, it also seeks to define the boundaries of materiality and non-materiality, and explores possibilities from which beauty and materiality could transform one’s perceptual experiences.