Parts of Everything
​(2026 - Present)

Parts of Everything is an assemblage-painting series by Singapore artist William Goh that investigates how time becomes legible through ordinary things moving between the city’s public and domestic spheres. Cloth hangers from HDB routines, stickers once pasted on a bus-stop pillar outside a polyclinic during the SARS outbreak, disposable masks, and obsolete diskettes and cables from the artist’s stores enter the work not as illustrations but as provenance—material witnesses marked by wear, instruction, and obsolescence. In a Heideggerian sense, these objects oscillate between readiness-to-hand and presence-at-hand: withdrawn from their instrumental circuits and re-situated on canvas, they disclose the worldhood of Singapore’s infrastructural life—its polyclinics and bus stops, void decks and corridors, its technics of efficiency braided with care.

Crucially, these are not paintings that depict objects; they are paintings that think with objects. The series treats found matter as time-travelled elements repurposed to function pictorially. Color is largely found—the clinical whites and blues of masks, the greys of aged plastic, the sun-faded chroma of printed labels—while line arises from the given linearities of hooks, wires, and torn edges. Yet collage here is not limited to attachment. Goh reinvents collage through painting, and painting through collage. Grounds are prepared to receive disparate substrates; transparent glazes tint plastics without denying their sheen; scumbles and veils modulate found chroma into a coherent palette; drawn and painted passages bridge gaps between heterogeneous surfaces; negative space is actively composed to pace density and rest. Pigment becomes an infrastructural medium—sealing, binding, and negotiating differences—so that the picture field reads not as a heap but as a calibrated ecology. Where classical collage often foregrounds rupture, Goh’s procedure choreographs correspondence: paint sutures edges while preserving their legibility, allowing adhesives to yellow, plastics to warp, and residues to remain visible. This refusal of seamlessness makes assembly itself the site of thought, a counter to enframing that would reduce things to mere standing-reserve.

Locality is condition, not theme. The bus-stop pillar outside a polyclinic is an archetypal Singapore threshold where instruction meets waiting and bodies synchronize with transit and weather; importing its stickers imports those rhythms. Cloth hangers carry the domestic cadences of high-rise living; masks bridge home and street. By juxtaposing these strata, the series renders palpable how public messaging, transport efficiency, and household routines co-produce forms of dwelling. The compositions calibrate knot and interval—cable clusters and stacked diskettes anchoring attention, exposed grounds opening porous pauses—so looking unfolds like movement from corridor to concourse, void deck to bus bay. Time appears as texture: scuffs, creases, adhesive ghosts, brittle flex. Provenance is read on the surface rather than relegated to caption.

In dialogue with contemporary strategies seen in artists like Helen Marten—where re-tasked materials operate as semantic and formal actors—Goh’s works remain insistently local in reference and charge. His painterly decisions do not overwrite the objects’ histories; they articulate relations among them, converting equipment into testimony without sanctifying detritus as relic. Collage is thus reinvented as a mode of painting that composes with already-colored, already-shaped facts of life, while painting is redefined as a practice of care that stabilizes, tones, and stages encounters among unruly parts. Parts of Everything invites attentive dwelling rather than spectacle: a sustained look at how a city’s pasts stay operative within the present, not as nostalgia, but as working elements in the ongoing assembly of meaning.

"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."