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While the presence of foreign-born artists has impacted and defined contemporary British art, this is neither an isolated or new occurrence. Prior to the 18th century, British art had long been dominated by a series of foreign-born artists. Globally, post-war Modernism has been informed and shaped by artists moving independently or through necessity to foreign lands and who have, in the process, fused their own unique identity into art. They have become significant markers in defining new nationalist art. |
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The Sculpture of Kim Lim: Unconventional Innocence – Horace Brockington
While the presence of foreign-born artists has impacted and defined contemporary British art, this is neither an isolated or new occurrence. Prior to the 18th century, British art had long been dominated by a series of foreign-born artists. Globally, post-war Modernism has been informed and shaped by artists moving independently or through necessity to foreign lands and who have, in the process, fused their own unique identity into art. They have become significant markers in defining new nationalist art.
British culture has not always acknowledged the contributions of non-white/non-European cultures, a byproduct perhaps of its imperial past. Artists such as Housihiary, Kapoor, Dogerty and Shonibare, to cite only a few, are important figures in the diverse nature of British contemporary art. Kim Lim is an early example of artists outside the “official” culture using identity to negotiate art, and notions of British-ness. In her work, the historical intersects with the sociological informed by her travels and own place in British society.
British sculptor and printmaker, Kim Lim was born in Singapore in 1936, spending much of her early childhood in Penang and Malacca. She died in London in l997. Kim Lim’s oeuvre encompasses a wealth of practices and concerns. Her body of work consists of floor-standing sculptures, wall reliefs and a large series of prints. Printmaking was an occupation of equal artistic importance in her creative life. Her works reveal a depth and simplicity of expression. She uses lines and surfaces to explore the spaces in between.
Kim Lim’s art is about the basic elements of nature and the deeper expression of the human condition. Her forms are built upon her deep investment into surface treatment and the reduction of forms to their fundamentals. As she moves from the 60s through the 90s, she becomes increasingly aware of the function of surface to render artistic ideas in stone that results in a calming eloquence devoid of the need for rhetorical declaration in order to speak to the impalpable spiritual presence of nature.
Her characteristic form is the column or pile of stones—element set upon discrete element, block upon block—varied sometimes by the single slab, raised here upon a base though it could as well be set into the ground. Her choice of materials included Roas Aurora, or white marble, Portland stone and slate. Such models go back to the most ancient times, to standing-stones and stele, tombs and markers, from Ireland to the far Orient by way of Crete and Egypt, Persia and India. Kim Lim makes no open recognition of any such references or influences, which remain only a matter of inference and association, a broad context for personal engagement, sympathetic and unspoken. Any such thoughts, possibilities and connections are for us to make.
Kim Lim’s sculpture consists of blocks of marble set on lesser stones or plinths. The blushing and streaking of the pale marble often creates a parallelism in which the use of rather classical materials often purpose a linkage to the traditional hierarchies of stone sculpture. The changing quality of light on the stone’s surface is an important factor in the forms Lim creates for it helps to reinforce the refined shapes with an economy of means, that remain outside of the construct of minimalists.
Creating her works without assistance allows the artists to give intense attention to the minute detail of curves, lines and surface treatments. The most obvious marks made are the vertical incisions in the sides of the chunks of rock, which proceed in a shallow curve, often the entire length of a plane. Her approach has been described as “meditative stone carvings evoking natural forms and rhythms." However, the marks come across as most unnatural, the sculptor imposing her own inhibited, repetitive and predictable patterns on the rock. She has described these often as the ripples of water, the repetition of a musical line or a heartbeat.
Kim Lim is a symbolist after all, albeit of the most refined and abstracted kind. The structures themselves, so classical in their architectural simplicity—weight on weight, vertical against horizontal—are immediately questioned and subverted by the quality of their working, essentially gentle, seductive, insistent dynamic of curve and sway, with its hints of organic life and growth; the shift of light across those broken, contrasted surfaces that inevitably marks the unforgiving moment and the passing of time.
Although many of Lim’s works—sculptures and prints—were produced in the 1980s and 1990s, they reveal a sensibility that the artist formed back in the late 1950s when she received her art education. At the age of eighteen, the artist decided to move to London in order to study at Saint Martin’s School of Art, between l954 and 1956. Lim would have encountered Anthony Caro who, from l953 to l963, taught at St. Martin ‘S School of Art. This was a significant period for change in Caro’s own work that clearly acted as a point of interest for a group of younger sculptors, all born between l934 and l937 and associated with the school first as students (variously between l955 and l962) and then as teachers including; David Amnesle, Michael Bolus, Philip King, Tim Scott, William Tucker, and Isaac Witkin. While artists such as Kim had clearly been influenced by Caro, their work also reveals a determined opposition to the contained and imposing monumentality as a necessary condition in sculpture.
At St. Martin Kim Lim became fascinated by the potential of woodcarving. Moving on to the Slade School of Art, she instead concentrated on printmaking. Earlier on at Slade, Lim’s teachers included Lucian Freud and Keith Vaughan (painting); John Buckland Wright and Anthony Gross (etching and engraving); and Rudolph Wittkower and Sir Ernst Gombrich (art history). Fellow Students in the 1950’s included Paula Rego, Bernard Cohen, Harold Cohen, David Storey, Michael Andrews, Ibrahim El Salahi, Victor Willing, Joao Pires Cutileiro, Euan Uglow, Michael Sandle, Yolanda Sonnabend, Peter Snow, Lorenza Mazzetti, Frank Bowling and Craigie Aitchison. In the 60s students included Dennis Creffield, David Hepher, Tess Jaray, Patrick Proktor, Derek Jarman, Terry Atkinson, John Davies, Timothy Hyman, Maggie Hambling, Lutz Becker, Jennifer Durant, Colin Self, Jann Haworth, Michael Kenny, Kim Lim, Mark Vaux, Terry Setch, John Wonnacot, John Virtue, Malcolm Le Grice and John Lessore. Teachers included Frank Auerbach, Michael Andrews, Harold Cohen, Bernard Cohen, Robin Denny, Barto dos Santos, Stanley Jones, Peter Snow and Peter Daglish. Expansion of printmaking into newly available space on the second floor undoubtedly inspired Lim’s lifelong interest in printmaking, a preoccupation that continued throughout her career.
In 1966, Lim had her first solo exhibition in London at the Axiom Gallery. From this period onward she exhibited extensively in group and solo exhibitions throughout Europe and the Far East, although she remained relatively unknown in the United States.
Maintaining her connection to her native Singapore, Lim returned home frequently while traveling extensively. Her journeys would become important points of investigation for Lim as they brought her into a close and fruitful interaction with the arts of India, China and Southeast Asia, especially with the purity of Cycladic sculpture. This art was created by the culture after about 2800 BC. These peoples often buried their dead with marble sculptures. The figures are often angular, abstract in quality and have a striking parallel to a type of modernist reductive tendencies. The consideration of the nature of Cycladic sculpture in her work is profound for understanding the artist’s work it reveals in the manner in which she moves into the space and structure of the stone to release latent energy and in order to propose immaterial objects of contemplation.
Early on, Henry Moore linked the body to the landscape. Inspired by Cycladic and Mexican sculpture he had seen in the British Museum, Moore emphasized the natural quality of the stone. Often he linked the female form in nature with the landscape. However, for Lim, her investigations of Cycladic sculpture lead essentially to the minimal and the abstract, although references to the landscape are often implied in her work, she is less concerned with figuration or narration. By this approach, Kim Lim was uniquely able to fuse the primordial with the modern in her work.
Kim Lim must be seen alongside a middle generation of British sculptors including Robert Adams, Kenneth Armitage, Reg Butler, Lynn Chadwick, and Bernard Meadows who were too young to be considered a part of the generation of Henry Moore or Barbara Hepworth whose relations to European had been established before the war. Sir Herbert Read best summed up this middle generation whom he describes as “Free in their fantasy, however experimental in their techniques. Respectful of the limitation of a monumental art that should be by definition imposing, enduring and therefore compact.” For Lim, the intent was finding a path to renewal of forms that could expand her art.
British Sculpture owed considerably to the legacy of Henry Moore and Barbara Hepworth in changing the nature of sculpture at the start of the twentieth century. While Henry Moore provided the sculptural object in British sculpture at the beginning of the twentieth century, then Anthony Caro dismantled it. After these two, sculptors in Britain aimed to transcend the autonomous object, operating with different content and different forms. Unlike Henry Moore, Lim did not seek to create an abstract derived from nature, but rather a re-discovery of the inner forces that constitute the rational core of nature.
The 60s, of which Kim Lim was a vital part, represented a period when the practical and conceptual would meet in British sculpture. Meaning and identity of sculpture was largely reconsidered in England in the 60s, and that reconsideration was done largely by reference to concepts of Modernism’s first encounters with American painting and by articulation in American criticism. The discourse drew attention to the possible practical and conceptual links between “alternative” traditions of constructed sculpture and important developments in modern painting. There emerged a new agenda of concerns for British art. However, it would be erroneous to look for a common homogeneity in their work that began to emerge from the mid-60s. What characterized the work overall are relatively simple volumetric forms; cones, thick slabs, and box shapes.
Subsequent generations of sculptors including Barry Flanagan, Richard Long, Bill Woodrow and Richard Deacon would greatly embrace in their works, concepts early on explored by Kim Lim. American sculpture as explored by Judd, Morris or LeWitt would move along different lines than their British counterparts.
In l960, Lim married painter/sculptor William Turnbull, making London her permanent residence, while continuing to travel extensively. Turnbull has visited the Far East on various occasions and this has strongly influenced his work. In l969 he produced a book of Haiku poems by the Japanese poet Basho. Turnbull was a contemporary of Caro who, along with Eduardo Paolozzi, had for some while been producing sculpture that looked to recent Parisian art rather than to the native tradition dominated by Moore. Turnbull had also been a student at Slade in the 40s alongside fellow classmates Richard Hamilton and Patrick Heron.
While Kim Lim operated rather independently in the shadow of her widely acknowledged husband, it is apparent in both artists’ work shared similar concerns. However her works are never as austere as Turnbull’s steel sculptures. Kim Lim remained a singularly unique, very distinct artist. Her approach entirely reflected own visions of life and art. Her works of the 60s and 70s were essentially carved from wood using forms inspired by basic rhythmic forms and structures with each element forming a balancing whole. Throughout her career, Lim’s works would be characterized by the simplicity of form, an almost calligraphic expression of the artist’s response to the world around her.
Despite Turnbull’s presence, Kim Lim’s works is far more impacted by the work of Brancusi, Noguchi and Hepworth. What Turnbull provided for Lim ‘s sculpture is a sense of the modern simplicity and abstraction, a type of intense simplification of humanism. However, in the case of the art of Constantin Brancusi are numerous affinities between the art of Kim Lim and that of Brancusi. For both Kim Lim and Brancusi, the material implication of the work reveals its essence. Both artists aimed to express the spirit that underlies and organizes nature. Each sort to express through shape and surface the various forces of nature. Similar to Brancusi’s achievement at the start of the 20th century in fusing late l9th century concerns with early Modernism, Kim Lim incorporates various currents of the European avant-garde of the first half of the 20th century with the wide range of developing artistic movements developing rapidly after the l960s.
Kim Lim’s early works consisted of wood carved works before moving on to stone, her preferred medium. Earlier on, she worked equally with metal and plastics. Lim developed a unique understanding of stone and worked almost exclusively in it. Lim was intrigued by the possibility of contrast between the seemingly imperishable quality of stone and the delicate impressions that she was able to make on her sculpture. Manipulation of surface allowed Kim Lim to endow the sculpture with a profound meditative calm and rare beauty. Through carving techniques she decisively exerts metaphorical meanings into shapes.
Kim Lim states, “In the earlier phase of work, I used mainly wood. I have always been more concerned with space, rhythm and light than with volume and weight. These preoccupations were more obvious in the work of the 70s, where repeated elements were used to create a structure that would sustain a certain rhythm, where space is not emptiness but a palpable reality.”
Lim traveled extensively through Europe and Asia en-route to Singapore where she encountered sculpture from India and Southeast Asia. Viewing these works would have a lastly impact on her. She was drawn to this work for both its aesthetic properties but equally the spirituality implied in the work. Such formal interplay and counterpoints summon up ideas and imaginative possibilities for the artist. Her own work soon began to reflect concepts associated with Cycladic trophies, Celtic memorials and Shinto shrines. Kim Lim embraced these interests and resolved, them both formally and imaginatively, in her work.
However, in the end, the more contemplative and spiritual yet properly disinterested qualities of the tradition from which she came remain uppermost in any consideration of her work. A dictum of the Taoist, Chuang Zhu, says it all: "Adopt no absolute position. Let externals take care of themselves. In motion, be like water: at rest, like a mirror. Respond, like the echo . . . " 1 For Lim, art that fails to stir the imagination is no art at all.
An early sculpture King, Queen, Pawn (1959) consist of three simply shaped wooden blocks with sections blow-torched to give a variation of color. Similar to the work of Brancusi, Kim Lim’s art is an axial of modernism vision. But, while Kim always acknowledged the influence of Brancusi in her use of simplified, reduced abstract forms, here her concern for the specific qualities of the materials, as in her use of charred wood to create contrast, echoes the impact of Eastern spirituality, and concepts of balance are evident. Kim Lim’ s abstractions operate to persuade doubters that even this most gently minimal of abstract sculpture may have its imaginative point.
Bronze Water (1978) explores the space between the lines to create effects of movement. Here the ripples on the surface activate the potential of the space. An important tendency that emerged in British sculpture during the 80s involved a reliance on organic forms as manifestations of states of being or feeling, often allied with a great sensitivity for the physical qualities of particular materials. The 80s were an equally critical period for British art in the world, a new widespread recognition, the emergence of new visual vocabularies that electrified the environment for making and exhibiting art in Britain. There still remained a line of descent in the work, which leads from Henry Moore and Anthony Caro—namely a particular tradition of object–making in Britain. Still, sculptural possibilities were now expanded to the point where it could now be anything and do anything.
In the 80s, Lim began to sculpt with stone, which gave clarity to her preoccupations around engaging with the material’s particularities and of evoking natural elements such as wind, air, and light. Catherine Grant, writing about the work Sea-Stone (l989), describes the work as marble which 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.
“After a number of years I felt the need to move to a less static structure, one where I could incorporate if possible the element of change and surprise. It also happened at this time that I was asked to design a fountain. I made a few maquettes and experimented with stone, going back to my favorite method of working, carving. The pleasure of working in this material where one was not constrained by the dimensions of a tree, gave impetus to exploring ways of working.”
—Kim Lim
Sian Jay has described Lim’s art of the period as imbued with a purity that speaks of the reduction of natural forms and the paring down of nature to create Zen-like images.
Padma II (1984) reveals a calculated balance of two components, carefully placed grooves and delicate striations on the stone’s surface. It is in stone that Lim expands her ability to reflect her responses to the natural world. She reduces the vastness of nature to a human scale, such that the suggestion of ripping of water, the effect of wind upon the sand, and the light falling on different surfaces is conveyed to the viewer.
Works such as Gobi (1982), Batu (1980), and Untitled Relief (1981) echo the emptiness and loneliness of vast desert wastes. In Gobi, carefully worked undulating lines that emulate the rhythms of sand dunes, fragmentary landscapes of shifting sand interrupt the coarseness of the natural grain. Lim repeats these formal devices again in the works Batu, and Untitled Relief where she repeats the ripping effects.
In these two latter works, Lim plays with the concept of visual opposition and symmetry, dissecting the stone so that the two halves create different optical effects, which are reversed when one walks to the other side of the sculpture. Batu is more sharply defined that the untitled work. Untitled Relief is surface is treated in order to suggest an ancient and worn form, as if to propose it has emerged from the earth in this form.
Lim’s explore related concepts in the work, Wind/Water Series I (1983) in which the sculpture evokes a fleeting second of the wind’s movement across water.
Spiral II (1983) and presently part of the Cass Sculpture Foundation is characterized by the simplicity of the stone wedges, their slightly differing heights and careful placement with seemingly minimal intervention by the artist, endows this work with serenity and wholeness. However, nothing has been left to chance. The rhythms introduced through curves and repetitions are in complete harmony, both within the sculpture itself and in its carefully selected context. Spiral II is a smaller version of Spiral III.
Spiral III is in the collection of Alstair McAlphine and is displayed in a large pool interspersed with lily pads at Bishop’s House in Perth, Australia. The large version is over 12 feet wide, and the white Portland stone provides stark contrast with the linear motif of further spirals incised in the seven stones which make this piece.
Kim Lim: “When Lord McAlphine asked me to do a big piece for his garden in Pert, stone seemed to be the obvious choice and Spiral was the result. I have always been intrigued by the way shells are formed, growing in a circular spiral formation. I cut seven wedge-shaped stones, not identical in shape or size, but sufficiently similar to keep the feeling of repetition. I wanted it to have, if possible, the sense of pace, of tempo, by controlling the height of each stone, starting low, rising slightly, then descending, the incised lines linking one stone to the next and accentuating the sweep of the curve.”
Line plays an important part in Lim’s creation of space, as evident in a large work Langkaw (1988) in which the artist uses line and texture towards radically different ends. A few decisive lines scored in the side of the column create a sense of fine balance and weightlessness. Similar to what occurs in the works of Brancusi, as the viewer’s eye follows the verticals, the work appears to soar. Langkaw speaks to an artist consciously mediating between the everyday, the iconic and the monumental.
In the late 80’s and early 90’s work, these tall, simple, ambiguous modern totems confirm rather the more monumental aspect of her later work than the wry and playful qualities of her early work, with the forms often simplified by the optical density of the carbonized surfaces. The exception is a floor piece that consists of lumps of charred oak interspersed with somewhat clumpier carved lumps of alder, set out in a ring formation. Materially seductive though it is, its essentially arbitrary and precious aestheticism soon takes over.
These later works are stimulating these pieces, cool, pale and quiet. The pieces invite completion just as they seem to absorb the light, drawing it in into the grain of limestone, granite, marble – self-contained, self-absorbed, immutable yet oddly and quietly alive. They command their own peculiar space, as perhaps an altar in a chapel, a shrine by the roadside, a stone in the field. What we bring to them is our own affair, for they speak only of unknown gods, and bear no mark other than that of the artist’s hand that passed across them.
In the 1990’s Kim Lim became more concerned with imbuing the stone with a lightness and softness, evident in the work Syncopation No.2 (1995) in which a large piece of slate has been slashed with regular cuts, so that it appears almost as a drawing rather than a solid form. The work reveals an extreme control over form and context. It equally reveals an extreme technical refinement and sophistication.
She remains entirely abstract in the work, cutting no symbol, making no sign, and encouraging no reference. Her immediate engagement is purely formal, either resolving her disparate elements into a whole, or articulating the block of stone, whether flat or raised, for what it is – a block of stone. For the most part, the particular block, brick or slab will remain unmodified, but accentuated either by deep incisions that register as a kind of drawing, or by a shallow, precise stepping and layering of its several surfaces, which hold the light as a kind of shading. A length or log of stone will be sawn through at intervals, and the parts replaced one upon the other, to be at once rejoined and their new condition re-emphasized by the curving, swaying linear incisions that move across the gap between, or stop short, or fail to match. One block will over-hang another; a polished surface run up against one subtly, carefully abraded; a sharp, clean edge contrast with one left rough and broken.
Kim Lim’s work operates between two opposing concerns that have impacted British sculpture since the l960s or rather two alternative modes of practice, or modes of conceiving practices. The first –identified with the Modernist mainstream predicated on the values of expression, sensation, spontaneity, newness and integrity of effect, supported by the dominant critical order, involved the reduction of aesthetic problems to the discrimination of formal effects. The second mode rests on the pre-supposition that such values as expressiveness; sensation, spontaneity, and newness have become conventionalized. Thus the new sculpture is somewhat conceived as architecture and theater. A new sculpture predicated on a belief in the encounter between spectator and the work of art.
For Kim Lim the notion of art is a reality itself. Art becomes for the artist a means of expressing a harmony in the universal order of things. Her fascination and re-discovery of former cultures is echoed precisely in the very materiality of her means, essentially stone. Lim’s interest in the materiality of means in her art k can be seen as part of a post 70s interest the ability of the means to move art deeper into the unknown.
Lim’s late works continues her thematic preoccupation of representing through the rhythmic and repetition of surfaces and angle sin a work a novel form of overwhelming simplicity. Lim’s surfaces are a fusion of sensuality and purity, both subtle and energetic. But Kim Lim is not merely interesting in echoing the beauty of nature, but to express through her lines and surface treatment the points at which the objects and phenomena intersect creating an all-embracing universal harmony. Kim Lim’s art concentrates upon the essences of nature, but they equally it strives for an equilibrium of the structure and the permanence of the material substance.
Kim Lim: “I have always been concerned with space, rhythm, and light than with volume and weight”
