This work was produced in 1985 – a year in which he won a Silver Medal at the Salon des Artistes Francaise, Paris. The 1980s was a period of prolific and intensive professional development. By the time this work was produced, he had already garnered critical attention, having won the first prize of the inaugural UOB Painting of the Year Competition in the early part of the decade in 1982.In the Clouds There are Dwellings depicts the artist's experience of rural life in Kunming, China's Yunnan province; he had encountered villages there and had been struck by the simplicity of their dwellings as well as habits of life. Goh had recalled the visceral image of cooking smoke coming from village houses, which he had conjured as swirling mists of clouds.The work's compositional structure is typical of his collaged landscapes, which are his "visual travelogues" that record his impressions from his travel on trains and on foot. However, this has a more restrained and earthy palette compared to the brighter collages that the artist is popularly associated with (of subject matter such as Peranakan weddings, tea merchants and Singapore’s China-town) that were also executed in the 1980s.
