Image size: 170.3 x 220.0 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. Fatal Points (1989) is exemplary of Goh’s enduring interest in different cultural knowledge systems and practices. It combines Chinese acupuncture charts together with found newspaper articles, including a reproduction of Michelangelo’s Creation of Adam illustrating the creation of humankind. The work is demonstrative of the visual syntax that Goh developed by the 1980s, which incorporates found materials that are sensitive to local cultures, communities and histories.
