Huxley-Parlour are pleased to present The Tiger’s Eye - a solo exhibition by British artist, Hannah Lim, at their Maddox Street gallery. 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 17th/18th 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.
Lim’s self-consciously flamboyant, elaborate, and playful design parodies Chinoiserie, but also raises questions about the much maligned category of the ornamental. In her book, ‘Ornamentalism’, Anne Anlin Cheng describes the stigmatisation of ornament in Fine Art as a viewpoint often anchored in racism and misogyny, as ornaments often become a proxy for East and South East Asian femininity. Lim’s sculpture, both maximalist yet miniature, capitalises on elaborate design, garish colours, and ornately depicted mythological creatures to reclaim the category of ornament and subvert fixed notions of identity and race.
Hannah Lim studied Sculpture at The University of Edinburgh before going on to complete her MFA at the Ruskin School of Art, Oxford. She has exhibited widely across the UK, including solo shows at Changing Room Gallery (2022), Commonage Projects (2022), and her current exhibition with Edinburgh Printmakers. She has also exhibited in group exhibitions at San Mei Gallery (2021), Delphian Gallery (2021), Collective Ending (2021), Berntson Bhattacharjee Gallery (2022), Christies (2022), Saatchi Gallery (2022), The Royal Scottish Academy (2022) and Bloomberg New Contemporaries (2022). She is the recipient of multiple awards, such as the Hospitalfield Residency (2021), the Home Residency by Ronan Mckenzie and Cob Gallery (2021), selected for RSA New Contemporaries (2022) and is currently Pangolin London’s 2022-2023 Artist in Residence.
She lives and works in London.
