Born of Peranakan descent, Sylvia Lee Goh’s paintings are objects of remembrance for the artist’s cultural roots. In this painting, a woman dressed in a traditional Peranakan baju panjang stands in a central niche that is in turn recessed into a red wall decorated with a floral pattern. Most of the artist’s attention has been dedicated to this pattern, consisting of reds, blues, yellow-golds, and whites, which has been applied with relatively loose brushstrokes. Writers on Goh’s work have often made the point that Goh's focus was never just about celebrating a bygone “Golden Age”, but was also about reclaiming a culture that is rapidly fading. We see this in two distinct aspects of the painting. Firstly, the manner in which the floral pattern that dominates the painting condenses at the bottom and gradually dissipates towards the top of the painting. We could also follow this interpretation in the way the figure is dwarfed by both the overwhelming ornament and relative scale of the painted wall. The figure is made unavailable to us by the remarkable amount of depth achieved in the painting, beginning with the bold strip of red at the bottom forming the imaginary base, the delicate shadowing at the bottom of the ornamental surface further recessing into the painted niche at the centre in which stands the figure of the woman. The effect is the image of a figure conjured to us at an unreachable distance, or a distant memory once known intimately by its viewer.