In 1954, Kim Lim left Singapore for Britain with the aim of studying art and becoming an artist. In London, she enrolled at St. Martin’s School of Fine Art and later at the Slade School of Fine Art, studying printmaking and sculpture with equal enthusiasm—two approaches that formed the basis of her work in the four decades that followed. During those formative school years, Lim studied under Anthony Caro and befriended other artists like Tess Jaray and Julia Farrer. She was particularly fascinated by the work of Brancusi, a shared affinity with William Turnbull, who became her husband in 1960. Lim began exhibiting work relatively soon after finishing her studies, with her first solo exhibition at Axiom Gallery in 1966 where she displayed early, colourful works such as Borneo II and Candy (as seen in the studio shot below), acquired the year after it was made by the Arts Council Collection. She exhibited regularly through the 1970s and 1980s with Nicola Jacobs Gallery.
Much of Lim’s early work can be characterised by her engagement with materials such as wood and bronze. Her printmaking practice was equally pervasive and prominent from the beginning. Works such as Abacus I and II (1959), two sister relief sculptures, modelled after the ancient Chinese calculation tool, employ a poverty of material and reveal Lim’s ability to transform fundamental shapes and concepts with an elegant gesture. Made of plaster shapes hung on wire within a rectangular wooden frame, these works eschew “high art” material for simplicity of form. Both works are now in the collections of the Singapore National Gallery and M+ in Hong Kong, respectively. Lim extracted inspiration from her own personal journey from the East to West, with the vernacular of those artists she admired from the West such as Giacometti. Importantly, Lim looked outside the “canon” of art as well. A keen observer of nature and of natural forces, she would echo the sinuous curves of a vast desert plain, the waves of a silent sea breeze, and other experiential moments of life in her work. The strength of a Gingko tree’s trunk, for example, as seen in the 1989 sculpture titled after this living fossil, in which a monolith of rose aurora marble fluted and carved by hand rests on a Portland stone base.
Lim’s 1970s work is marked by a deeper experimentation into concepts of “form, space, rhythm and light”. Her series Intervals, which refers to both sculptural and paper works, employs negative space with equal detail as it does with ideas of density and volume. The year 1979 would prove be a watershed moment for the artist, culminating in a mid-career survey show at The Roundhouse where Lim would exhibit works from every period in a non-linear and non-chronological method, partly in response to the venue itself, a circular gallery space. This was also the year that Lim moved toward an embracing of stone and marble mediums, materials that would remain present in her practice until her untimely passing in 1997.
The reoccurring and circularity of Lim’s motifs—from the most “concrete” such as the interval, or chess piece to the more “abstract” such as the curve of a plant or the effect of a southernly wind blowing—that punctuate Lim’s practice reveal a close attention to that which is not readily visible, and the method and manner with which Lim draws these ideas out of her chosen material remains one of the most compelling aspects of her practice. Lim’s work and life has re-emerged with new attention: recent exhibitions such as Kim Lim at the New Art Centre, Roche Court, Salisbury (2014); two solo exhibitions at the now closed S|2 Gallery (2017 and 2018) which was accompanied by the first monographic publication on the artist; Kim Lim: Sculpting Light at STPI Gallery, Singapore (2018); Minimalism: Space. Object. Light. (2018-2019) and Suddenly Turning Visible: Art and Architecture 1969-1989 (2019-2020) both at the Singapore National Gallery, Singapore; and Objects of Wonder. British Sculpture from the Tate Collection 1950s-Present at Palais Populaire, Berlin (2019) and Kim Lim: Carving and Printing, a collection spotlight at Tate Britain (2020-2021) have made her practice more visible in the public realm. Yet this is only the beginning: as the art world systemically attempts to reconfigure, revise and re-balance aspects of recent art history to make space for new narratives, examining the life and work of Kim Lim in her own context and in the context of today’s scholarship is vital.
Despite her work disappearing from visibility within the institutional framework for over twenty years—her last major London museum show until the 2020 Tate Britain display was in 1999 at the Camden Art Centre—Lim’s work remains an important signifier of the British art scene in the post-war period and indicates both the internationalism at that time, as well as the universality and longevity of her artistic concerns. Often there is a misconception today, that artists who are undergoing this radical transformation of newfound re-evaluation by curators, institutions and collectors are also marred by a lack of visibility in their time. This was not the case for Kim Lim and is not for many artists of this generation. For example, Lim was the only non-white, female artist to be included in the 1977 Hayward Annual and the following year formed the all-women committee for the 1978 Hayward Annual, alongside Rita Donagh, Liliane Lijn, Tess Jaray and Gillian Wise Ciobotaru, selecting artists for an exhibition which included both women and men active at the time. Equally, Lim also resisted any sense of “othering” during her lifetime, declining to be included in Rasheed Araeen’s 1989 exhibition The Other Story: Afro-Asian Artists in Post-War Britain at the Hayward Gallery, because she did not want to be “othered” by association.
Lim and Turnbull travelled the world, engaging with artist communities in America, notably the Abstract Expressionists, but also embedding themselves in the cultures of the Middle East, East and Southeast Asia. As Lim explained in her own writings: “In those days if you had a ticket from A to B, you were allowed to stop off en route for a couple days and catch the next convenient flight onwards – you were even allowed to make small deviations so long as it was in the direction of the destination. The result was I saw a lot of extraordinary, breathtaking paintings, sculpture and architecture first hand. I felt like a sponge soaking up everything.” Lim’s so-called “deviations” are in fact profound moments for her as an artist, allowing her to step away from images, patterns and cultures that she was already aware of, and “soak” in new forms and a plurality of rhythms situated in both real and imaginary places. By closely examining the biases that have shaped our recent cultural landscapes, there is the possibility of creating space not only for the actual entanglement of transcultural experience, but also the chance to admire again, with fresh eyes, the power and enchantment of an artistic oeuvre such as that of Kim Lim’s.
