Vanessa Liem

Vanessa Liem (b. 2002, Singapore) received a BA from the University of the Arts, London in 2025.

Liem’s paintings exist within an ethereal, airbrushed universe populated by biomorphic and oneric figures. At the heart of her practice is an interest in blurring the line between the surreal and the real, a visual strategy that mirrors the interplay between her inner world and external reality.

Rooted in her personal experience of mental health, Liem’s work emerges from a desire to understand how observation, both observing and being observed, affects our mental state, bodily awareness, and sense of agency. Drawing on thinkers like Berger’s Ways of seeing, and Kandinsky’s dichotomy between “The Internal” and “The External”, painting becomes a stage for exploring the nuances of vulnerability, visibility, and performance ; a space where the psychological and physical awareness of the body, Liem’s and others, intensifies. The scenes Liem paints are often based on real-life settings, yet they become personified expressions of her own interiority, carried out as a kind of visual “pathos”.

For her work, she won Gold for the 2019 UOB Painting of the Year, Emerging Category and was named one of Prestige's 40 under 40 in 2024.

Sixty Summers Here

Aisha Rosli, Anna Du Toit, Casey Tan, Faris Heizer, Joel Seow, Marla Bendini, Oneal Parbo, Shen Jiaqi, Vanessa Liem, Yom Bo Sung

12 Jul - 8 Aug 2025

Singapore

Cuturi Gallery is proud to present Sixty Summers Here celebrates a generation of ten young Singaporean artists, in their 20s and 30s, whose practices reflect the vitality and resilience of art-making today. Marking Singapore’s 60th year of independence, the exhibition brings together works across painting, drawing, sculpture, installation, and more—foregrounding process, experimentation, and everyday life. Rooted in care, attentiveness, and creative rigour, these practices offer quiet but powerful propositions for how art can persist, connect, and evolve. Together, they signal not just what’s emerging, but what’s already here—and here to stay.

ART SG 2024

Aisha Rosli, Casey Tan, Faris Heizer, Israfil Ridhwan, Khairulddin Wahab, Marla Bendini, Shen Jiaqi and Vanessa Liem

19 - 21 Jan 2024

Art Fairs, Singapore

Vanessa Liem exhibits at Lot Projects with other young artists

25 - 28 May 2023

May 25, 2023

Curated by Dylan Morris, Cardboard Radiator features Vanessa Liem (b.2002, Singapore) along with 4 other young artists; Dylan Bardoe, Enoch Hitchcock, Jacob Walden and Tilia...