Born in 1954 in Singapore, Ng Yak Hwee is a graduate of Singapore’s former Nanyang University (Botany major). An accomplished painter and sculptor, Ng received the 1987 Silver Medal from the Salon des Artistes Français, and won First Prize (Figurative category) in the 1992 UOB Painting of the Year Competition.The mixed media work ‘Me & My Cat Named Dog’ is simultaneously a homage and a rare self-portrait of the artist with his beloved cat, who Goh found as an abandoned newborn behind his house. With a humorous nod to the Los Lobos song “Me and You and a Dog Named Boo”, Goh has created a touchingly light-hearted figurative painting in which the loosely sketched charcoal lines convey the companionable silence between both subjects. During the 1990s, Goh’s paintings will stylistically and thematically move away from abstraction and nature towards the figurative and social commentary.
