Overview
Eric Goh’s research focuses on modern and contemporary art of Southeast Asia, with a particular emphasis on questions of craft, medium, materiality, indigeneity, and ethnography.
His dissertation, The Trouble with Craft: Art, Indigeneity, and Modernity in Malaysia, moves across Orang Asli carving, batik, photo-collage, and tikar, asking how the dialectic between art and craft has mediated changing notions of tradition, nation, and region. It explores how the paradoxical embrace and disavowal of craft has haunted artistic discourse from the postcolonial modernism of the 1950s and 1960s through the emergence of contemporary art and its regional institutions and exhibition circuits. More broadly, his project considers how modern and contemporary art became ethnographically entangled with the forms and relationships it mediates.
His research has been supported by the Asian Cultural Council, Cornell’s Mario Einaudi Center for International Studies, and the Southeast Asia Program. He serves as the Managing Editor of ARTMargins (MIT Press) and is a member of the editorial collective of Southeast of Now (NUS Press). He holds an MA in Art History from the Institute of Fine Arts at NYU and a BA in Economics from the University of Edinburgh. His art writing has appeared in Artforum, Heichi Magazine, and various exhibition publications. He maintains an active curatorial practice alongside his academic work.