Hannah Lim. The Tiger's Eye.

About

Lim presents mixed-media sculpture and watercolour paintings which take imaginative departure from Chinoiserie to reflect on cultural exchanges between Europe and East and South East Asia, and to explore her own identity as a woman of mixed British and Singaporean heritage. It will be Lim’s first exhibition with Huxley-Parlour, and the first time she has exhibited watercolour paintings.

Lim creates colourful and intricate snuff boxes, gates, altarpieces, and hanging ornaments which take direct inspiration from Chinoiserie – a seventeenth century aesthetic style derived from a rising trade with China, and more insidiously a colonial romanticisation of the East as Edward Said describes as ‘a place of romance, exotic beings, haunting memories and landscapes’. Lim’s colourful sculptures, which are often anthropomorphised with little eyes, legs, arms and feet, returns agency to objects which have historically been home to a projected ‘sovereign western consciousness’ which understood Asia as ‘one of its deepest and most recurring images of the other’, but in many ways too, ‘a surrogate and even underground self’. Taking both ancient Chinese and medieval bestiaries as an aesthetic source, Lim uses intricate design and mythological creatures to examine the complex configurations of power and identity conferred to Chinoiserie, whilst also exploring her own identity as a woman of mixed heritage in parallel.