Artist's Statement
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Kakim Goh performing in “Vissa d'arte”, produced in Montreal, Canada, 2013. Still video frame: © Kakim Goh
I was born in Singapore, a country so small that on a world map, one could confuse it for a grain of sand surrounded by the liquid blue of seawater.
Having spent more than half of my life away from my country of birth, whatever I recall of it is veiled by the naïveté of a child’s nostalgia. I belong to the category of floating populace, stranded sea urchins and rock-clinging barnacles; a people shipwrecked, searching amidst the sea for a tangible heap that one could call home.
I am a chameleon by circumstance, nature and choice. Uprooted from my childhood in South East Asia, transported to Canada in my teens and having spent my early adulthood in Mexico, I have lived a nomadic life, traversing cultures and continents, straddling languages and sensibilities.
The exile’s song is an improvisation on ancestry. Through migration, the fabric of my patrimony and parent culture were worn down and reshaped by the reality of my new surroundings.
By circumstance of history, I do not speak Chinese. Although I am versed in three languages, my mother tongue is alien to me. Language - the most fundamental connection with one’s heritage is thus lost to me.
As a consequence, I have always felt like a conspicuous outsider, always on the periphery and never totally articulate in my own culture. I reclaim through art what I am unable to express through words. Through art, I am able to connect with the world and feel a sense of belonging.
My oeuvres map a personal pictorial language that reformulates and extends aspects of Western modern art history and Asian classical painting and calligraphy. Largely inspired by the works of Chinese painters Chu Ta (1625 - 1705) and Qi Baishi (1864 - 1957), Mexican muralist David Alfaro Siqueiros (1896 - 1974) and American Abstract Expressionists Willem de Kooning (1904 - 1997) and Jackson Pollock (1912 - 1956), I decipher their bold compositional devices, spatial values and rigorous brushwork as points of departure for investigations into the formal aspects of contemporary painting. Out of this fertile soil, I endeavor to hone in on my craft and bring forth work unique to my own personality and history.
My painting practice is deeply rooted in performance and improvisation.
I paint in acrylic on mural-scale paper supplementing the time-honored processes of Oriental brush painting with unorthodox methods of application. I use house painting brushes and intermediary mark making tools such as chopsticks, rope and hairdryers to drag and project the medium onto the surface, resulting in call and response exchanges with brushwork combinations. I employ a “wet-on-wet” technique on Western rag paper using only natural spring water. The paint which is applied unmixed, spreads rapidly across the damp paper surface, fusing with other colors, coagulating in areas, falling into crevices, expanding and contracting. The outcome is unpredictable because the tonality of the motifs is determined by the paper’s drying rate and its exposure to the surrounding atmospheric conditions. The images transform as the water evaporates and the paint is absorbed by the paper fibers.
I create my paintings on the floor and work on the compositions from all angles on my feet and knees. Dancing around them as one would around a bonfire, I resuscitate images hidden in the surface of the paper. The macro and micro, topographies, aerial vistas and a myriad of organic and biomorphic forms are born from this choreography of attack and withdrawal.
The painting process is the performance.
My work is a hybrid of diverse cultural influences; a response to my personal history with migration and the continually growing cultural phenomenon of globalization. My impetus is to enrich the vocabulary of contemporary art by synthesizing these diverse traditions and contradictory cultural influences into a unified conception that transcends geographical, cultural and artistic distinctions.
Because of the transient nature of my past, I strive to capture a moment and transmute it into permanence in my art. I feel the need to plumb the spirit of a person, place, space or object, go from the outside inward so that I might extract their essence.
Drunk with images, I see my life’s work as an exploration and a journey.
As I cannot undo history, I seek to create my own.
Kakim Goh
January 2015
Having spent more than half of my life away from my country of birth, whatever I recall of it is veiled by the naïveté of a child’s nostalgia. I belong to the category of floating populace, stranded sea urchins and rock-clinging barnacles; a people shipwrecked, searching amidst the sea for a tangible heap that one could call home.
I am a chameleon by circumstance, nature and choice. Uprooted from my childhood in South East Asia, transported to Canada in my teens and having spent my early adulthood in Mexico, I have lived a nomadic life, traversing cultures and continents, straddling languages and sensibilities.
The exile’s song is an improvisation on ancestry. Through migration, the fabric of my patrimony and parent culture were worn down and reshaped by the reality of my new surroundings.
By circumstance of history, I do not speak Chinese. Although I am versed in three languages, my mother tongue is alien to me. Language - the most fundamental connection with one’s heritage is thus lost to me.
As a consequence, I have always felt like a conspicuous outsider, always on the periphery and never totally articulate in my own culture. I reclaim through art what I am unable to express through words. Through art, I am able to connect with the world and feel a sense of belonging.
My oeuvres map a personal pictorial language that reformulates and extends aspects of Western modern art history and Asian classical painting and calligraphy. Largely inspired by the works of Chinese painters Chu Ta (1625 - 1705) and Qi Baishi (1864 - 1957), Mexican muralist David Alfaro Siqueiros (1896 - 1974) and American Abstract Expressionists Willem de Kooning (1904 - 1997) and Jackson Pollock (1912 - 1956), I decipher their bold compositional devices, spatial values and rigorous brushwork as points of departure for investigations into the formal aspects of contemporary painting. Out of this fertile soil, I endeavor to hone in on my craft and bring forth work unique to my own personality and history.
My painting practice is deeply rooted in performance and improvisation.
I paint in acrylic on mural-scale paper supplementing the time-honored processes of Oriental brush painting with unorthodox methods of application. I use house painting brushes and intermediary mark making tools such as chopsticks, rope and hairdryers to drag and project the medium onto the surface, resulting in call and response exchanges with brushwork combinations. I employ a “wet-on-wet” technique on Western rag paper using only natural spring water. The paint which is applied unmixed, spreads rapidly across the damp paper surface, fusing with other colors, coagulating in areas, falling into crevices, expanding and contracting. The outcome is unpredictable because the tonality of the motifs is determined by the paper’s drying rate and its exposure to the surrounding atmospheric conditions. The images transform as the water evaporates and the paint is absorbed by the paper fibers.
I create my paintings on the floor and work on the compositions from all angles on my feet and knees. Dancing around them as one would around a bonfire, I resuscitate images hidden in the surface of the paper. The macro and micro, topographies, aerial vistas and a myriad of organic and biomorphic forms are born from this choreography of attack and withdrawal.
The painting process is the performance.
My work is a hybrid of diverse cultural influences; a response to my personal history with migration and the continually growing cultural phenomenon of globalization. My impetus is to enrich the vocabulary of contemporary art by synthesizing these diverse traditions and contradictory cultural influences into a unified conception that transcends geographical, cultural and artistic distinctions.
Because of the transient nature of my past, I strive to capture a moment and transmute it into permanence in my art. I feel the need to plumb the spirit of a person, place, space or object, go from the outside inward so that I might extract their essence.
Drunk with images, I see my life’s work as an exploration and a journey.
As I cannot undo history, I seek to create my own.
Kakim Goh
January 2015