In Many Voices (1999), Jolly Koh presented a body of work that functioned as a deliberate defense of the formalist tradition during a period when Malaysian contemporary art was pivoting toward urgent sociopolitical commentary. By the late 1990s, “issue-based” art had begun to dominate regional discourse, a shift Koh addressed in his catalogue essay where he claimed to be prioritizing “inherent artistic merit” over social utility.

Koh explicitly situated his practice within a specific lineage of Malaysian modernism—citing figures like Syed Ahmad Jamal and Latiff Mohidin—to reassert the validity of the painterly vocation as a self-contained pursuit. Focusing on the structural qualities of oil on canvas and the technicalities of color theory, the presentation served as an aesthetic manifesto, positioning the formal experience as a site of resistance against what he saw as the increasing instrumentalisation of art for social or political goals within Southeast Asia.