Matrix of Change
(2024-2026)
Matrix of Change
(2024-2026)
At the core of Matrix of Changes series lies a philosophical inquiry into the conditions of memory, perception, and the ontological status of presence. Drawing on the ideas of Jacques Derrida, particularly the notions of trace, absence, and hauntology, the work reflects on how meaning is produced through a continuous interplay of erasure and emergence. Derrida’s concept of différance — the deferral and difference inherent in language and experience — serves as a critical lens through which this series may be understood: not as a fixed narrative of transformation, but as a space where memory, fantasy, and disappearance converge in an unstable matrix. The works are composed of oil on linen, deliberately subjected to acts of destruction — cutting, tearing, and abrasion. These gestures are not simply violent interventions but are integral to the generative process. The image arises not solely through application, but through removal. This dialectic between creation and destruction mirrors the artist’s broader meditation on urban change: the ways in which cities evolve through the displacement and demolition of the past to make way for the new. This tension is both personal and structural.
Goh observing the shifts in their environment, experiences a sense of loss — not only of physical structures, but of the familiarity and rootedness they once offered. In their place emerges a landscape marked by estrangement and flux. The result is a surface that acts as both ruin and record: a visual and material palimpsest through which the viewer confronts the complexity of transformation. Matrix of Changes questions the very nature of disappearance. When something is removed from physical space — a building, a street, a memory — does it cease to exist? Or does it continue to live on in the subjective memory of individuals, in cultural residue, or in images shaped by imagination? This liminality — between what was, what is remembered, and what never existed at all — becomes a central tension in the work. The surfaces of the paintings, though materially grounded, evoke spectral forms that flicker between presence and absence, between technological construction and poetic reverie. There is a matrix-like aesthetic to the composition — one that evokes digital distortion, pixelation, and glitch — but it remains rooted in a deeply human process. The work becomes a map of internal perception as much as a commentary on external change. Through it, the artist constructs a poetics of loss, remembrance, and becoming, refusing any neat resolution and instead inviting the viewer to dwell in the ambiguity of transition.
In Matrix of Changes, the act of destruction becomes an act of revealing. The works do not mourn what is lost as much as they trace its lingering presence — haunting, unresolved, and perpetually in the process of becoming.
"I believe in the authenticity and directness is key. I reject impractical processes and think that pragmatism and functionality is the essence of truth. The relationship between time and functionality is unwelded if any process is held for its functionality. Timelessness and relativity is a reconfiguration of the syntax of a society and metaphysic. Through re-configuration, the theme in my artwork is translated into various forms to present an atmosphere of subtle tension augmented between different magnitudes and dimensions."