1980s

In the 1980s, Goh Beng Kwan began to develop a visual language that was uniquely his own. Under the advice of his mentor and tutor at the Provincetown Workshop, Leo Manso, Goh resolved to imbue his works with an 'oriental perspective’. Thus, the Western manner of expression he had been trained in at the Art Students' League of New York made way for the Eastern techniques concerning form and space.

In 1982, Goh won the first prize at the inaugural UOB Painting of the Year Competition with his abstract collage painting The Dune (1982). Following which, he decided to become a full-time artist and was represented by the Art Forum gallery. The materials used in Goh’s collage works are intimately meaningful to him as they are deliberately chosen to embody elements of reality and to operate as recognisable signifiers of ‘localness’, tinged with nostalgia and alluding to the contexts from which they have been taken. Works from this decade share a warm, muted palette of brown, beige and orange, perhaps the principal colours of an urbanised tropical landscape. His compositions from this period also resemble the structured, geometric imagery that the Cubists favoured, a trait that would soon dissipate by the 1990s.