Emil Goh was an artist, designer, traveller, foodie, people person. He was born in Malaysia on 6 March 1966 and studied psychology (Newscastle University) and then Fine Art (Sydney University), developing his practice across different media, particularly video and photography. Emil exhibited extensively throughout Australia and internationally. He moved to Seoul in 2004. At age 43 on 7 September 2009, he passed away due to a heart attack at his apartment in Seoul.
by Ooi Kok Chuen – Malaysian Journalist
Emil Goh has a way of making us more aware of what are perceptibly mundane things in everyday life as if there were some heroic quality in the passive and the inert. How the many things we treat as mere objects or commonplace actions can in moments of sentimental introspective, mean something and something much more.
by Sylvia Lee Goh, Malaysian Artist
4 September 2010
A year has passed in the blink of an eye. The sun still shines. The birds are still singing and pair of squirrels are thrilling in sharp shrieks, oblivious, oblivious.
How is one to encapsulate the whole life of another human being in so many words or in so many pages? Is it ever enough? 43 years is just a memory now, and soon this too will be gone. Only what has been archived, recorded and preserved will stand the test of time. That too, and for how long? Everything is corruptible. Life is but a blink of an eye in eternity.
by Beverly Yong
14 September 2009
Emil Goh (b. 1966, Malaysia) passed away last Monday 7 September at his apartment in Seoul.
Emil was an artist, designer, traveller, foodie, people person. We cannot lay claim to him in earnest as our fellow countryman – Emil really belonged to a broader sort of society, a ‘man of the world’ in a very today sense. Yet there was certainly the Malaysian in him, who loved to eat good food, banter, and kaypohin a positive and creative way. Most of us in Malaysia will only know of Emil through his work, which has been shown intermittently here in curated shows at the Balai Seni Lukis Negara (National Art Gallery) and elsewhere. Some of us know him as the son of the painter Sylvia Lee Goh, who would be touched that those in the art world here, especially artists, have voiced real sadness and shock at the news of his passing.