Kim Lim

Kim Lim (1937–1997) was a Singaporean-British sculptor and printmaker of Chinese birth. She was most recognizable for her abstract balanced form wood structures as well as her stone-carved sculptures encapsulating the complexities between art and nature and her attention to the minute detail of curve, line and surface finish.^[1]

Early life

Kim Lim was born in Singapore and spent much of her early childhood in Penang and Malacca.^[2] After her schooling in Singapore, Lim knew that she wanted to become an artist. At the age of 18, she decided to go to London to study at Saint Martin's School of Art (1954–1956) where she took a particular interest in wood-carving; she then transferred to the Slade School of Art, where she concentrated on printmaking, graduating in 1960.^[3]

Career

In the 1960s and 1970s her sculptures were mainly carved from wood, using forms inspired by basic rhythmic forms and structures, with each element forming a balanced whole. Her prints from this time also explore these modulations, as in the etchings Set of Eight (1975), which consist of simple patterns of blocks and lines. After her twenty-year retrospective towards the end of the 70s, Lim began transitioning to working in stone and marble, which were included in the exhibition alongside her wood forms: ‘it made me very aware of the pull within myself between the ordered, static experience and the dynamic rhythms of organic, structured forms,’ she concluded. ‘How to incorporate and synthesise these two seemingly opposed elements within one work became … the starting point for the … stone sculptures.’^[4][5]

From 1980, she turned to stone-carving, continuing to make prints and fill sketchbooks with drawings from nature. In 1980 Lim began to sculpt with stone, which gave a clarity to her preoccupations around engaging with the material's particularities and evoking natural elements such as wind, air and light, whilst continuing to make prints and fill sketchbooks with drawings from nature. In Sea-Stone (1989; London, Tate), the marble has been carved with incised lines and textures so that the stone both seems to be worn by the sea and to contain something of the fluidity of water. In the 1990s she became more concerned with imbuing the stone with a lightness and softness, as in Syncopation No. 2 (1995), where a large piece of slate has been slashed with regular cuts, so that it appears almost as a drawing rather than a solid form. Throughout her career she traveled to China, Indonesia, Cambodia, Egypt, Malaysia, and Turkey with her husband, artist William Turnbull.^[6][7][8]

References