Lim’s Forms
Louise Stern
When a word is repeated, it loses its meaning and becomes merely a sound. Every day we repeat our motions, walking to and from the loo, staring off transfixed into space after feeding the cat, serving a cup of tea. The tracks of our motions would become congealed if we left a gleaming slimy snail trail after us. The tracks would build up until they became neat rows of rounded and lumpy forms, like Jason Lim’s ceramics.
As a performance artist and ceramicist, Lim jumps back and forth. Sometimes he chooses to embody the repetition, and sometimes he makes the forms himself.
The forms of Lim’s ceramics are everything that is yet to come, that already is, that will never be, that is in Singapore and not there and that is in his body when he performs. They are all the same in their difference, all showing the meaning that comes and goes and the ridiculous task of trying to find it and pin it down. The ceramics move and at the same time are still. The repetition allows for that, the rows of lines or warts giving the viewer the choice of staying on one of the spheres, climbing into it, or moving on to the next.
The maker of the ceramics shows himself in the same light as one of these clay warts in his performance and video work. A recent Singapore Lab 2005 video loop shows the turning on and off of a faucet. In the same year, a performance at Tokyo’s Out Lounge Gallery sees Lim dismantling a broom made out of reeds bunched together. From a neat group they become neat symmetrical lines on the floor next to Lim. Always he surrounds himself and his work with things happening again and again, either motions or objects or lines.
Especially in his performances, gestures that were enough to satisfy Lim at first become unsubstantial and force him to take them further. In a 2003 performance at the Future of Imagination festival in Singapore, he starts by shaving every hair off his body. They fall to the ground as the broom reeds did. They become less than they seemed at first, and Lim ends by pushing the point of the razor deeper into his skin.
Currently Lim is preparing for a solo ceramics exhibition in Tokyo, Japan in April. In the same month he will be presenting performance in two performance art festivals, Satu Kali in Kuala Lumpur Malaysia followed by Future Of Imagination 3 in Singapore. In May, he will take up a residency work period in Vermont at the Studio Center.
