Justin Lim – Sanctuary

Richard Koh Fine Art (RKFA) is pleased to announce Malaysian artist, Justin Lim’s (b.1983) solo exhibition with RKFA in Singapore. Titled Sanctuary, this exhibition is scheduled to run from 26th February – 20th March 2021 at Richard Koh Fine Art Singapore, Blk 47 Malan Road, #01-26 Gillman Barracks, Singapore 109444. The artist will present twelve works from his Sanctuary series.

In Sanctuary, Lim presents dreamlike spaces juxtaposed with the everyday life in disjointed, constructed and at times, artificial environments. This series places the human figure, painted from Lim’s personal photographs of friends and acquaintances, in a field of tension between imaginary landscapes, architecture and collage-esque ‘glitches’. Reflecting on interpretations of Utopia and the trappings of contemporary society, paintings in Sanctuary were created as a response to being trapped in the pandemic.

Viewers are presented with elements of everyday life and traditional landscape, creating new narratives that reflect contemporary reality. Simplistically depicted lone figures, gatherings of people, and spaces are all reconstructed in a cut and paste method of composition, to create stories that mirror these uncertain and chaotic times. Views from windows create paintings within paintings, reflecting the sombre mood of the modern post-truth world, and the use of various colours contrast the mediated and the highly saturated world we live in. The various scenes feature sections of imagined landscapes in monochromatic colours, to portray scenery that is not limited to preconceived notions of what is seen as reality – seeing is not believing, and what we see is not necessarily the truth.

Justin Lim (b.1983, Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia) completed his postgraduate studies in 2006 with the Master of Art (Fine Art) program by The Open University UK conducted at Lasalle College of the Arts, Singapore after obtaining a BA(Hons) Fine Art majoring in painting. He has exhibited widely in Southeast Asia in various solo & group exhibitions and was the recipient of the 2008 Malaysia-Australia Visual Artist Residency at Rimbun Dahan, Malaysia.

He has since held residencies at the Vermont Studio Center, USA (2011 – Asian Artist Fellowship/ Freeman Fellowship), Red Gate Gallery Beijing (2013 – Khazanah Nasional Artist Residency), and The Tasmanian College of the Arts, the University of Tasmania, Australia (2016 – International Artist in residence). Selected group exhibitions include the Asian Art Biennale: Viewpoints & Viewing points, Taiwan Museum of Fine Arts (2009), Modern Love, Earl Lu Gallery / Institute of Contem-porary Art, Singapore (2015), Asia Young 36 / Asia Contemporary, a survey of contemporary Asian art practices, Jeonbuk Museum of Art, Jeonju, South Korea (2016) and Contemporary Chaos, curated by Demetrio Paparoni, Vestfossen Kunstlaboratorium, Norway (2018). He currently lives and works in Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia.