Tang Yau Hoong's work is an interplay of light, space, fiction and reality

Kuala Lumpur-based illustrator and graphic designer Tang Yau Hoong produces work that teases the boundaries between fiction and reality. His flat colour-fields and solid compositional skills ensure immediacy, but any initial understandings we have – that a certain form is “light”, for example – is playfully and cleverly torn away, as in his Controlled Efficiency illustration. The bright palettes and use of paint-streaks are reminiscent of Roy Lichtenstein, and his calculated use of negative and positive space is very Noma Bar. There is also a preoccupation with structures and structuring – from the disintegrating cities of So Long, Old World to the alteration or eradication of important symbols, that perhaps evoke the conditions of “making” and producing graphic work.