Kim Lim

Kim Lim (1936–1997) was a Singaporean-British sculptor and printmaker of Chinese descent.

She is most recognized for her abstract wooden and stone-carved sculptures that explore the relationship between art and nature, and works on paper that developed alongside her sculptural practice.

Lim's attention to the minute details of curve, line and surface made her an exponent of minimalism.

Kim Lim was born in Singapore and spent much of her early childhood in Penang and Malacca.

At the age of 18, having finished her schooling in Singapore, Lim moved to London to enrol at Saint Martin's School of Art (1954–1956).

There, 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.

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 stainless steel sculpture, Column (1971–72), has been seen as an instance of minimalist art in Britain.

Candy (1975) is one of the sculptures that exemplifies these characteristics, showing the artist's interest in balance, colour, form and her concept of 'less elaboration and more strength'.

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 synthesize these two seemingly opposed elements within one work became … the starting point for the … stone sculptures.’

At the First Hayward Annual in 1977 Kim Lim was both the only woman and the only non-white artist represented, her work appearing alongside that of notable male contemporaries such as Frank Auerbach and Kenneth Martin.

There was growing recognition of systemic sexist bias within the art world at this time.

For the Second Hayward Annual, in an attempt to redress this balance and make a public statement about gendered selection-bias, an all-female selection committee was formed comprising Kim Lim, Tess Jaray, Liliane Lijn, Rita Donagh and Gillian Wise Ciobaratu.

During the 1980s, Kim Lim turned to stone-carving, and continued 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.

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.

During her career she travelled to China, Indonesia, Cambodia, Egypt, Malaysia and Turkey with her husband, artist William Turnbull.

During these travels, the artists engaged with artist communities in America, 'notably Abstract Expressionists such as Mark Rothko, but also embedding themselves in the cultures of the Middle East, East, and Southeast Asia.'

While Kim Lim was well-known and respected among artists and collectors during her lifetime, her work has been slow to be recognized internationally.

Contrary to the popular assumption that Turnbull influenced her, close friends and family—such as their son Alex Turnbull and artist Tessa Jaray—have suggested that the exchange for creativity was mutual.

As Bianca Chu writes in Ocula Magazine, on the occasion of the artist's spotlight exhibition at Tate Britain in 2020, 'her determination to leave Singapore, a home and a life path that was comfortable and without risk, for London, and her eventual absorption into and of her new home, reveals a mutability and elasticity characteristic and constitutive of her artistic practice.'

Work in public collections