Object size: 101.9 x 103.5 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 Beng Kwan also experimented with a broad range of mediums including steel. Iron Defence (1988) is one of two steel assemblages ever produced by the artist using machinery parts in the late 1980s. Extending the artist’s interest in depicting doors, gates and entrances, Iron Defence suggests a blockade and references the development of Singapore’s domestic arms and defence industry amidst a growing rhetoric of self-reliance post the withdrawal of British military forces in 1971.
