Kim Lim’s painted-steel arch, “Day”, radiates an otherworldly glow in a Yorkshire garden, the flat, white arc narrowing to a sliver as the viewer circles it. A beguiling monument on an approachable human scale, it was first exhibited in Sculpture in the Open Air at London’s Battersea Park in 1966, alongside work by Henry Moore, Barbara Hepworth, Anthony Caro and Elisabeth Frink.
In her lifetime, Lim was a relatively successful British artist — the only woman in the Hayward Gallery’s annual show in 1977, with a solo survey at the Roundhouse two years later. After her death from breast cancer in 1997, her art fell from view. An anomalous talent as a Singapore-born sculptor — “female and foreign”, in her own words — she made her mark, yet disappeared from art histories and curatorial surveys blind to her transnational contribution to postwar British art. That she was married to the Scottish sculptor William Turnbull may have further eclipsed her in some eyes.
A Sotheby’s show co-curated by Bianca Chu (now adviser to the Kim Lim Estate) reignited interest in 2018. Now Lim’s first major museum solo since 1999 runs until June 2 at the Hepworth Wakefield in Yorkshire — which acquired “Day” for its garden in 1983. Curated by Abi Shapiro, Kim Lim: Space, Rhythm & Light spans more than 100 works created over four decades. Together with an impending retrospective at the National Gallery Singapore in September, the show reaffirms her as a key figure in late-20th-century sculpture and printmaking.
Her white-marble “Kiss” (1959) pays homage to Brâncuși’s “The Kiss” (1907) — and his influence remains on her later stone sculptures. But while the Romanian’s fused lovers are hewn from a single block, her couple’s discretely carved heads barely touch, the tight space between them charged with sexual tension. This narrow gap filled with possibility — as crucial as the silence between musical notes — recurs in the abstract red sculpture “Minerva” (1964) and the print “Red Split” (1969). Lim considered space a “physical substance — to be articulated, manipulated”, and Chu likens her work to Zen Buddhist gardens in which “empty space is pregnant with more energy”.
Lim’s interest in negative spaces may also have to do with her in-between state. Born in 1936 in Singapore (then part of British Malaya) to Peranakan Malay Straits Chinese parents, she grew up there and in Malacca and Penang under colonial rule. She came from a “syncretic culture”, Chu tells me, with several world views and languages even before she arrived in London in 1954 to study fine art: “Resisting categorisation was something important to her.” Declining an invitation to show in The Other Story: Afro-Asian Artists in Postwar Britain (1989) at the Hayward, Lim said she did not want to “other herself”. At St Martin’s School of Art in the 1950s, she was taught by Frink and Caro, but when Caro opposed her turn to abstraction (having yet to adopt it himself), she transferred to the Slade — where the Sudanese artist Ibrahim El-Salahi was among classmates.
Travel, she wrote, “was my art education, not art schools”. Before and after her marriage to Turnbull in 1960, she made stopovers between London and Singapore in Italy, Greece, India, Cambodia and Japan. A photograph of her London studio shows a row of maquettes beneath a pinboard of her photographs, ranging from Greek and Egyptian statuary to Hindu temple carvings and Stonehenge. Not belonging to one place, Lim wrote, gave a “certain feeling of detachment from which one could view both east and west”. Sensing “important similarities and sympathies”, she rejected a hierarchy of “primitive art . . . leading up to the kind of epitome of western art, which is the Renaissance”. There were, she felt, “other things equally good”.
Her early titles reflect this openness, from the abstract bronze “Pegasus” (1962), with hinged, semicircular wings, to the wood assemblage “Samurai” (1961). She credited a Basque artist with teaching her to handle wood, and indeed the sturdily industrial, bolted-together sculptures recall the great Basque sculptors Eduardo Chillida and Jorge Oteiza. The wood-and-metal “Ronin” (1963), a Samurai warrior wandering without a master, subliminally evokes Japanese architecture and costume. Though Lim grew up under Japanese occupation in Penang (where her father was a British-educated magistrate), she embraced pan-Asian culture. Chu says, “She had an ability to see, unfettered by prejudice.”
Her two sons, musicians who run their parents’ estates, recall growing up in a rambling house in Camden Square, London, where each artist had a studio, with a garden where Lim, in boiler suit and face mask, would wield a mallet. Their father, Alex Turnbull tells me, was “from the Dundee shipyards”, while their mother was “trying to run away from the rigid expectations of a woman from a good family in Singapore”. There was a “two-way influence”.
Colourful sculptures in industrial materials, such as the stainless-steel, two-tone “Blue Note” (1966), were in her first solo show at London’s Axiom Gallery. As her work grew more conceptual, her concerns, she wrote, were “not so much for volume, mass and weight, but rather with form, space, rhythm and light”. A 1976 series of “paper cuts”, printed on transparent acrylic sheets, plays with light and shade. Ballet training in Singapore and tap-dance in London fed works steeped in rhythm: the print “A Minor” (1979) resembles a leaf, with silver lines emanating from a stem. Modular sculptures, such as the four mahogany slats of “Interstices II” (1977), allow for site-specific variations, like music.
Titles such as “Borneo I” and “Irrawaddy” hint at an abstraction that “looks non-figurative but,” Lim wrote, “comes from the seen and felt world.” The large organic fibreglass shapes of “Trengannu II” (1968), on the floor, reference a Malaysian beach. The small bronze “Water Piece” (1979), whose terraced mound of irregular concentric rings catches rainwater and light, suggests memories of monsoons.
After the Roundhouse survey in 1979, Lim became prolific in stone, creating some of the most compelling works in the show. She took inspiration from patterns in nature, especially wind and water. She made “Spiral I” (1983), a broken circle in Portland stone, having observed sea turtles laying eggs in the sand in Malaysia, while the delicate “Rainstone” (1994) evokes runnels in rock.
Her stone sculptures might appear monumental in photographs, but they are small-scale, tactile and intimate. “Wind-Stone” (1989), among the biggest here, scarcely reaches head height. Though Lim’s left arm was damaged in a car accident in the 1970s, and she worked without assistants, hers were aesthetic choices. She embarked on the physically challenging “Riverstone” (1990-91) soon after spinal surgery. “She made her biggest stone sculpture when she was weakest,” Chu says, adding that, for Lim, “carving was an act of faith.”
A vitrine with her photographs of Zen gardens and Cappadocia caves and sketchbooks harbouring pressed flowers illustrates how wandering enriched Lim’s visual vocabulary, feeding a unique abstraction inflected by experience and memory. Ultimately, I was left wanting more of this fascinating material from her life — not to limit her art to the biographical, but to reveal its breathtaking expanse.
To June 2, hepworthwakefield.org
