Goh Ee Choo's Temples for Meditation
By Constance Sheares, 1996
Goh Ee Choo starts his unpublished essay Thinking about My Work and Life on 8th March 1995 with these words: "The main aim in my art and life is to raise the overall energy level of the viewers.... Like meditation, yoga, spiritual practices, relaxation, dietary approach, I see art as one of healing and transformation, as an energy enhancing/life-saving practice that raises the energy level and dissolves the conflict, tension and anger in the viewers so that they can be healthy, happy and have a good heart." He believes that art has the power to focus on issues that are crucial to the way we understand one another and our world. In installations staged at regular intervals since 1986, Goh has tried to take on the role of organising and revealing, indeed, the role of spiritual leader. Although individual exhibits may be classified as painting, sculpture or drawing, together they demand a re-orientation of the mind. We are confronted by works that raise social, religious and political issues, including the issue of the work of art and its right to a special status.
The exhibition Power Structure, shown at the Goethe-Institut Singapore in 1991, comprises a series of related works, put together to form a monumental installation. History of Sexuality Series features complex configurations which recall medical textbook illustrations of human organs and musculature. These, such as Breakthrough, are rather disturbing pen drawings: sensuous and three-dimensional and, at the same time, linear and sinuous. Richly and delicately worked in wide-ranging tones of blacks and greys, they vibrate with an energy suggesting growth and regeneration. Goh recognises the interpretive potential of abstraction and follows the surrealist example of using the unconscious as a starting point. He has developed an intuitive and expressive use of the pen to arrive at a free and suggestive abstraction which calls upon our memory of our physical and tactile experiences of the world and its structure.
The Theatres of Power in the same exhibition, on the other hand, comprises large perspectival pen drawings of a simple, geometric shape - the cube - interpreted and viewed in innumerable ways. Balanced and harmonious, they emanate a cerebral and transcendental quality.
Goh called this exhibition/installation Power Structure because he was trying to draw an analogy between the hidden power of certain structures and the social and political restrictions to which humans are subjected - ideas he had developed from a personal interpretation of Michel Foucault's philosophical writings. The sensuous organic forms contained within rigid, geometric structures are metaphors for the rational social order we have to observe in matters such as sexuality and aggression. Our natural vitality is forcibly restrained and suppressed.
The Rite of Silence shown at the National Museum Singapore and the Last Rite at the Taipei Fine Arts Museum, both in 1993, are even more conceptual in character, yet they seem to be conceived with as much solidity and physical presence as a chair or table. Full of visual poetry, these installations were meant as temples for meditation and reflection - a theme which has assumed a major significance in Goh's art since its initiation in his Between Heaven and Earth - Cocoon Installation for the first Australian and Regional Art Exchange Exhibition in Fremantle, Australia in 1987. He has, in fact, developed and expanded upon it in all his subsequent installations. In Heaven and Earth, the large and monumental works which range from black through to white reinforce the sobering effect the contemplation of man's passage from birth to death would have on the spectator. In his publication, Thinking about My Work and Life (1995) Goh writes: "In my life and art I look toward Buddhism and Taoism for the source of inspiration: in Buddhism the theory of dependent-origination and emptiness, and in Taoism the concept of chi or vital energy." Harmoniously composed and balanced, yet there is in these works a hint of unease or foreboding, of dark secret places.
A major stride forward was made in 1994 when Goh began adding colour to his work, tentatively at first. Secret Meaning and On Complete Reality, featured in the 1994 group exhibition 5 Directions at the Takashimaya Gallery, are ink drawings over which a layer of acrylic is spread so that the predominant blacks are softened by an overlay of ochres and browns. Though essentially duochromatic and strongly graphic, they have a richness and luminosity lacking in the black-and-white drawings. These works were inspired by Thomas Cleary's The Book of Balance and Harmony which advocates the acquisition of spiritual peace through the mastery of change and the understanding of time.
Colour is more positively and confidently handled in Gob's recent exhibition Beyond Boundaries (held jointly with Saleh Japar in 1996). The Yantra Series, 1995, was inspired by tantric Buddhist mandalas or mystic circles used in ritual performances and the incantation of mantras or mystic syllables, in particular the Yomi or Womb mandala which is divided into 13 parts containing 405 deities. Geometric and symmetrical, some with a soft infusion of pink or yellow, these pencil drawings are meditative in their mandala-like simplicity.
The most famous of Tantric mapitras is Om Mani Padme Hum (O the Jewel in the Lotus), believed to bring about a better rebirth. It forms the subtitle of Goh's Enlightenment Series, perhaps the most impressive exhibit in this exhibition. It is composed of 76 pen and ink drawings, some painted over in acrylic, below which a row of dishes with rice is placed on the floor as a ritual offering. The images are the result of an auto-genetic process that takes place during the act of drawing. Each stroke is abstract and associational, one mark suggesting the next and so on. These obsessive, surrealistic studies explore infinite linear convolutions and variations. They are meant to be read as a unified composite image, rather than as a sequential narrative. These intricate, labour-intensive compositions are 'painterly', the impression being generated by the dense web of cross-hatched lines by which Goh achieves a Rembrandtesque chiaroseuro and a luminescent shimmering and hovering effect.
The Container Shrine Series for World Peace, a set of ten works, each in the format of a cross, formed the main exhibit in Goh's installation for the Container 96: Art Across Oceans in Copenhagen in May 1996.The artist's intention was to recreate the experience of a Buddhist shrine, a space for meditation and prayer, inside a twenty-foot container. He was convinced that art should not be created solely for itself, for self-expression, but should serve a purpose, and in the Asian context it should be in socio-religious terms. He wanted to create an environment which would liberate the spectator from mundane concerns, relieve him of base feelings and desires, and thus promote peace of mind and goodwill towards others. The inspiration for this installation was derived partly from the Vietnamese Thich Nhat Hanh's publication, The Sutra on the Eight Realisations of the Great Beings, copies of which were distributed to visitors at the exhibition.
Goh Ee Choo is a visionary artist who creates a tension between the felt and the perceived from which his monumental, metaphysical drawings and paintings derive their power. Guided by principles that are partly aesthetic and partly ideological, he tries to expose moral and ethical factors which convention considers purely private. His art is concerned with making visible what is invisible, literally giving body to the spirit of life.
About the author:
Constance Sheares received a Bachelor of Arts (Honours) degree in European Art History from the Courtauld Institute, University of London, in 1966 and a Master of Arts degree in Asian Art History from the University of Singapore in 1970. Currently, she is an Associate with the Centre for the Arts, and Curator of the Ng Eng Teng Gallery, National University of Singapore. She is also a member of the Singapore Art Museum's Acquisition and Exhibition Committee and the lstana Art Acquisition Committee, and Chairperson of the Singapore Arts Centre's Art Panel.
