In the heart of Singapore’s landscape, Boo Sze Yang (b. 1965) paints the mundane with a sense of haunting intensity. As a Singaporean contemporary artist, he transforms the everyday, ordinary objects, and political viewpoints into reflections of the human condition and the world we live in now. Rather than offering straightforward messages to his audience, Boo’s paintings stage a slow, uneasy contemplation of collective memory, authority, and existential disquiet. His practice can be understood as a sustained attempt to paint the emotional atmosphere of a rapidly changing society through the material language of oil on canvas.

The question posed in the epigraph by Boo has served as a turning point for Boo while he was doing his studies in the United Kingdom, at Chelsea College of Art & Design, University of the Arts London, when one of his professors commented that his work did not represent his identity and self. The criticism forced Boo to revise the course of his practice. He was challenged with the idea that without the artist’s presence, the work risks a lack of personality. In turn, he chose to abandon his much earlier works and start afresh by vigorously trying new ways to incorporate himself into his paintings. This shift set the stage for a practice deeply tied to the struggles and lived experiences.

Building on this realisation, the subjects that Boo paints are carried out as objects and spaces with which he experiences resistance. If a subject gives him nothing to say, he does not paint it. He intentionally creates paintings that are unsettling, inviting the viewers to sense an underlying tension and challenging them to question what they are seeing. In doing so, he encourages viewers to work though uncertainty with their experience with the paintings. His approach to the process shows how much he values resistance. Boo’s practice is grounded in the duality of intentional and unintentional actions in the art-making process. According to him, his approach is a negotiation between intended and unintended marks, in which errors and flaws are not removed, but rather embraced as agents of meaning. His practice serves as a counter space in which accidents are viewed as a source of creativity and surprise, in a society that typically associates the unintentional with mistakes.

This belief can be closely aligned to the way he thinks about the role of art in society. Citing a quote by Cesar A. Cruz, a Mexican poet and academic, “Art should comfort the disturbed and disturb the comfortable”, Boo positions his paintings as tools for reflection rather than resolution. At first, humour teases the viewer, providing minor hints or jokes, yet beneath that surface lies a more serious invitation: to think, to imagine, and to face the contradictions of the present moment. Even in his abstract work, Boo does not provide answers, but rather presents the artist as a questioner, someone who opens up ambiguity, inviting viewers to use their imagination. Boo has talked of his previous paintings, which were primarily grey, reflecting on his focus on uncertainty, doubt and the in-between. As time passed, however, he gradually understood that colour could be used to capture the sophistication of human emotion and lived experiences. This change in palette echoed the expansion of his practice in theme, from a quiet tension to more political and theatrical scenes.

It is in this context that The Gatekeepers can be viewed as one of the central themes of Boo’s ongoing engagement with authority, control, and observation across time.