Our Senses

A solo exhibition by Choco Goh

It starts before entering the space. With the climbing of stairs, dust piled along its edges, pressure on the beds of your feet and in your knees. Passing by the first floor – a studio filled with messy artefacts – you hear it before you see it. Soft melodic piano notes by Euseng Seto ripple in the air. Where do your senses start, and where do they end? The space welcomes you to Our Senses.

Choco Goh presents 3 series of works in the intimate Greydea Studios. Series 01: a series of prints, instructions, and an answer sheet. Glossy prints on the wall are each paired with a question the audience has to respond MCQ-style. Splashes of high-impact colour stand in front of you, bands and pools of colours melt into vibrant gradients. To immerse oneself in making a decision, sometimes you take a step forward, sometimes you take a step back. The last three colours have accompanying melodies, you don’t expect them to gel but they do.

These questions we answer serve as part of the artwork, asking: “How do you feel? What’s in your mind? Anything it reminds you of?”. The mind wanders to form connections towards each art print, only to find that the answer we hold isn’t an option on the list. It seems here we interact with the invisible “our” in Our Senses. Prior to this showing, contributors were gathered to “a sensorial preview of visual and sound”. Friends of the artist, both old and new, came together to freely submit their responses wherein popular answers were curated into the 3-4 MCQ options we now get to choose from. Some choices are more direct connections: “(A) Energy, (B) Sour, (C) Reggae or Brazil, (D) Sky” for a green-yellow linear gradient; some others less so: “(A) Womb feel warmth, (B) Intense stress, (C) Wong Kar Wai’s movie, (D) 80’s vibes” for a gradient mesh of green, pink, orange, brown. I went with a friend and comparing our answers at the end was a nice touch 🙂 

Friction came from matching an answer at the cost of my personal one, on some answers it felt like I was lying. I could’ve left them blank, but my desire to connect with the closest answer was stronger. Rarely do I get to feel dishonest from an artwork, how exciting! While slightly irked by this, I try to interpret it as a respectful invitation to engage with a curated time and space inhabited by Choco and her friends. An exercise in decentering the self and giving up control, does my rouge opinion matter here? With pre-set answers, decision fatigue is relieved for the public, the stranger, the unfamiliar to abstraction. 

By all means, these panels of colour are abstractions that interrogate our perception. For the common, abstract art’s undefined nature allows huge margins for personal interpretation. When what we see can be anything, we try to imagine the familiar, the comfortable, the easy. Choco breaks that by providing us with pieces that guide us into certain frameworks with those pre-curated answers and surprising melodies. What excites me about abstract art is how intentional it can be, trying to piece together feeling, form, and context into a wider narrative, bleeding into the real, bleeding into us. 

What started off as a final-year project, the current iteration of Our Senses re-emerged after 10 years. You feel the sense of time unfold. Series 02 Long Thoughts During The Day starts off as diaristic prose, then adapted into a 15-minute film of hues blending in and out of each other. The score paired with this piece envelops the room and sets the tone, soft and slow. This was the first sense that welcomed you. Rays shine from a projector, gradients bleed from light to dark to light and bright, again and again. A publication of aforementioned prose acts as interpretation, but maybe one would rather imagine their own story, sat on the floor in front of a faux window.

Series 03 A Moment in Our Lives is where the artist plays with paper and its form. On a clean table, sheets of white with printed gradients hold clean geometric folds. Served on plates and stands, these paper sculptures seem both familiar and unfamiliar. Initially conceived as a live performance, it was also recorded into a film. We see two figures sat across each other and the paper sculptures, gesturing a meal being eaten, yet their hands are empty and their mouths are closed. Is this a conversation? Can we speak to each other in colours? See each other through sound? Are you hungry too?

In an age where our senses are overstimulated and time slips away from our fingertips, leaving sticky residue, Choco’s Our Senses tests our own presumptions of sight & sound, inviting us to slow down and explore the expansive realm our senses can take us.