Kim Lim

Biography

In 1977 the First Hayward Annual opened at the Hayward Gallery in London. Among the participants were Frank Auerbach and Kenneth Martin, and only one woman, Kim Lim. She was also the only non-white artist.

By the time of the next annual exhibition she had joined an all-female selection committee with Tess Jaray, Liliane Lijn, Rita Donagh and Gillian Wise Ciobaratu. The committee was formed as a public response to gender bias in selection.

Kim Lim was born in Singapore into a family of Chinese descent. The sources give different years of birth: 1936 or 1937, and according to some, 16 February 1936. She spent her early childhood mostly in Penang and Malacca, and as a teenager in Singapore she trained in ballet. At eighteen, having finished school, she moved to London and from 1954 to 1956 studied at Saint Martin’s School of Art. There she became interested in wood-carving. She then transferred to the Slade School of Fine Art, where she studied sculpture and printmaking, and graduated in 1960. In the 1960s and 1970s Lim carved her sculptures mainly in wood. She built her forms on simple rhythmic structures, so that each element formed a balanced whole. Her love of dance may have prompted her interest in rhythm, music and movement; to my mind this is a plausible explanation, although, judging by the texts available, she never formulated it herself. Among these works is “Candy” (1975), in which she was interested in balance, colour and form, and whose motto was “less elaboration and more strength”. “Column” (1971–72), in stainless steel, is regarded as an example of minimalism in Britain. At the same time she made etchings: in the series “Set of Eight” (1975), simple patterns of blocks and lines.

Towards the end of the 1970s a retrospective of twenty years of her work was held. Alongside the wooden pieces it showed her first works in stone and marble. Lim herself said that this made her acutely aware of the tension within herself between the ordered, static experience and the dynamic rhythms of organic forms. How to bring these two elements together in a single work became, in her words, the starting point of the stone sculptures.

In the 1980s she turned to stone-carving, kept making prints and filled sketchbooks with drawings from nature. In the marble “Sea-Stone” (1989, Tate, London), incised lines and textures make the stone look worn by the sea. In the 1990s she was occupied with lightness and softness in stone. In “Syncopation No. 2” (1995) a large slab of slate is slashed with regular cuts, so that the piece looks almost like a drawing rather than a solid mass.

With her husband, the artist William Turnbull, she travelled to China, Indonesia, Cambodia, Egypt, Malaysia and Turkey. Their contacts with artists in America included, among others, Abstract Expressionists such as Mark Rothko. The common view that Turnbull influenced her is disputed by those close to her: their son Alex Turnbull and the artist Tess Jaray consider the creative exchange to have been mutual.

Her solo exhibitions were held at the Axiom Gallery in London (1966, 1968), at the Museum of Modern Art, Oxford (1975, prints), at the National Museum of Art in Singapore (1984) and at Yorkshire Sculpture Park (1995). Her work was shown in the British pavilion at Expo ’67 in Montreal and at the International Biennale of Prints in Tokyo. During her lifetime she was well known among artists and collectors, but international recognition came slowly. In 2020 she was given a spotlight exhibition at Tate Britain.

Kim Lim died in London on 23 October 1997. Her works are held by Tate, The Hepworth Wakefield, the National Museum of Art in Singapore, M+ in Hong Kong and the Middelheim Open Air Museum in Antwerp.