Introduction

Narrator:

Welcome to the audio guide for Kim Lim: The Space Between. A Retrospective. This exhibition is the largest ever dedicated to Kim Lim’s work. It's a homecoming that honours her pioneering contributions to sculpture and printmaking.

Lim was born in 1936 and grew up during British colonial rule and the Japanese occupation, moving between Singapore and Malaysia. In 1954, she went to the United Kingdom to study art. After graduating, she decided to remain in the UK, becoming one of the first Southeast Asian diaspora artists in post-World War Two Britain.

Here's Adele Tan, co-curator of the exhibition. Adele Tan: Kim Lim’s early experiences shaped how she saw the world. She lived through both privilege and privation, travelled extensively and was inspired by different cultures. This helped her forge a distinctive visual language. As a foreign female artist in a male-dominated art world, Lim tenaciously kept to her artmaking whilst taking on domestic roles as mother to two boys and wife to fellow artist William Turnbull. She challenged traditional narratives and refused to let others label her work through an orientalist lens. She didn’t simply follow popular trends in minimalism and abstraction. Instead, her works distil fleeting or unseen rhythms and spaces, like a beating heart, a melody, cast shadows or the natural cadences around us, especially through the elements of wind and water Narrator: Join curators Adele Tan and Joleen Loh to explore Lim’s meticulous use of form, space, rhythm and light and her impact on modern sculpture. In five more audio stops, you will hear how the simplicity of minimalism, and the interaction of space and form, influenced Lim’s art.