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.
