Return to Singapore: Cultures, Communities and Histories

Over time, Goh became increasingly confident in exploiting collage’s painterly effects. Combining everyday materials with layers of paint and calligraphy, he created sensitive works evoking local cultures, communities and histories. Take Geomancy, which references deeply-held Chinese cosmological traditions, or fengshui. Here, a circle is divided by threads into four quadrants, alluding to the luopan compass used in fengshui. Suggestions of ritual are made through layering Chinese tea-wrapping paper and calligraphy, and through the use of dramatic reds and blacks. The piece to your [right/left], Tea Merchant, also references a familiar cultural practice: that of drinking tea. Delicate rectangular planes of rice-paper overlap with Chinese tea-wrapping paper and tea labels, composing and enriching the pictorial surface. The buff-coloured papers, dyed in areas, crinkled and stained in others, create a soothing background balanced by the bright accents of the tea labels. Goh goes further to meld cultures with the symbolic and esoteric in the large work on your [right/left], Fatal Points. Here, he expresses an interest in different systems of knowledge. Goh assembles seemingly disparate fragments: traditional Chinese medical charts, references to the biblical creation of man and Western art, and symbols of body parts and human identity. Look below the feet of the Chinese medical diagrams, between the centre and rightmost figures. Do you see a fingerprint? Now step back. Can you make out a large face staring back at you? Operating on multiple levels—the cultural, symbolic and material—this work invites the viewer’s own creative interpretation. It illustrates the artist’s development of an aesthetic in dialogue with both wider developments in abstract art, as well as with peoples’ social and lived realities. We’re now at the end of our audio tour for Goh Beng Kwan: Nervous City. Thank you for joining me. To see more of this artist’s work, do visit the DBS Singapore Gallery at Level 2 of the City Hall Wing.