Image size: 75.7 x 99.5 cm
Goh Beng Kwan is one of the earliest post-war artists in Singapore to travel to the United States to pursue an art education, where he studied at the Art Students League of New York. Today, Goh is recognised for his contributions in collage, particularly for his incorporation of a wide range of cultural materials and motifs used to explore issues around cultural representation, urbanism, and identity. Goh first began exploring collage under the instruction of Leo Manso at the Provincetown Workshop, which he attended in the summers of 1964 and 1965. During this time, Goh began to incorporate into his collage materials sourced from his surroundings, including tissue paper, fabric, decorative paper and other discarded items like the paint-encrusted rags used by his artist peers. He then painted over the entire assembly. ‘Homage to Manso’ is exemplary of Goh’s early interests in combining collage with paint to create a harmonious composition with a unified pictorial space.