In the two films Hide … and … & Seek Matthew Goh offers glimpses into a subconscious being. Oddly familiar and teasingly fragmented, the films are inspired by Carl Jung’s writings on the shadow self of the human psyche. They present Matthew’s self-interrogation in a bid to understand and potentially integrate a shadow self with a conscious one. Each illusion that is born out of fear, becomes a distorted entity that interacts with the familiar in unnerving ways.

During the infancy stages of this project, Matthew focused on how fear can be used to tap into the unknown territory of the shadow. In the studio he played with a single source of light. With a body capsuled in a large elastic fabric, he began to stretch out different shadows. Parts of such visual aesthetic were later incorporated into the films. He further explored how fear causes the body to react in a series of experiments. In one experiment – body of fear – his subject was blindfolded and forced to run across the studio to touch the walls. As the speed increased, mounting amounts of tension and micromovements in the toes and fingers were observed. In another experiment – words of fear – he mimed self-doubting thoughts and monologues while a leaf blower was at his face. Mimicking how a shadow-self could distort the clarity of one’s intention, the warping of the facial features became fodder for both the visual and aural aesthetic of the films.  

With the films, Matthew dives into dreamscapes as a modus operandi for looking at the process of individuation where the shadow and conscious draw closer to each other. Echoing that intent, he keeps both the bed (holding the tangible) and television screens (reflecting the intangible) in soft focus for both films. Childhood apprehensions of monsters that may be seen as an embodiment of fear, disorder and abnormality (and possibly the beginnings of anxiety and paranoia) may become one way to understand the films’ world.