Lim received his BFA in Painting from the Maryland Institute College of Art, Baltimore, in 2022. His recent solo exhibitions include The Flood, Cuturi Gallery, Singapore (2025), and Daffodil, Singapore (2023). He has also participated in group exhibitions in Singapore and the United States. In 2013, he was awarded the United Overseas Bank Painting of the Year Award (Emerging Artist Category, Singapore), recognizing him as the Most Promising Artist of the Year. His work is represented in both public and private collections, and he continues to expand his presence in the Southeast Asian contemporary art landscape through an active program of solo and group presentations.
Stony Sleep, 2025, Oil on canvas, 121.9 x 152.4 cm, Courtesy of the artist and Cuturi Gallery, Singapore
As a kid I was obsessed with comics and magazines like Shonen Jump. What captivated me most were the trading card games such as Yu-Gi-Oh! — they felt like tiny intricate paintings. I remember holding them close to my face, completely absorbed by the details. That was probably my first real love for images. I began drawing characters obsessively, filling every page until there was no blank space left. My classmates wanted my drawings so much that they began collecting and even trading them among themselves. What stayed with me wasn’t the drawings themselves, it was the excitement they created in others. That was the first time I realized that making images could connect me to people — and in many ways, that hasn’t changed.
What are the main themes or concepts you explore in your paintings?
My grandparents migrated from China to Singapore in the early 1900s, bringing with them their language, customs, and beliefs. Growing up under a predominantly Western education system that often marginalized these traditions, I found myself unable to speak their dialect, while they could not speak the English I was taught in school. This meant I could not share in their daily lives, let alone their stories, memories, and histories. A large part of my past felt inaccessible, and I grew up with a persistent sense of absence in understanding my own identity.
Over time, this distance led me to think about myth and its role in shaping how we understand ourselves — the stories we inherit to explain where we came from, who we are, and where we might be going. That early experience of being between cultures — placeless, disoriented, fragmented — continues to shape my work. It made me aware of how identity is constantly formed and reformed through storytelling, and how personal memory and collective history overlap, collide, and transform into new identities.
How has your artistic style evolved over time?
Over time my practice has shifted toward a more spontaneous and layered way of working. In the studio, I’m surrounded by references, images, sketches, and fragments from earlier pieces. The process has become rather spontaneous: I try to keep it loose and not hold on too dearly to an image. It’s layers and layers wiped away, painted over, destroyed, built again—like recovering something from ruins. Drawn from countless references, it’s a fragmented way of painting and of seeing the world.
Can you describe a recent project or artwork that you are particularly proud of?
I’ve been working on a body of large paintings for my major solo exhibition The Flood. The project draws from flood myths across cultures. What struck me in these myths was how often they promised a hero, a sense of renewal, or a triumphant rebirth — as if disaster were always preordained to resolve with redemption. In contrast, when I looked at other depictions of catastrophe, such as Géricault’s Raft of the Medusa, I found something far less consoling: figures clambering over one another in desperation, enacting the brutal reality of survival. I became fascinated by this tension between mythical and historical narratives of disaster, and how they reveal the fragile borders between self and other. These stories, whether cyclical or fractured, continue to shape us as readers of history and as witnesses to the present.
I began to imagine the animals on Noah’s Ark not as peaceful survivors but in a similar state of frenzy and tragedy — overcrowded, colliding, swept together into a torrent of hunger and excess. The paintings take shape as densely staged tableaux, at once allegorical and chaotic. Their titles are inspired by W. B. Yeats’s The Second Coming, a poem that evokes the collapse of hope in moments of upheaval. For me, not every narrative resolves with redemption. Sometimes things spiral downward, and it is in that tension — between survival and ruin, order and collapse — that I want the work to remain.
What challenges have you faced as an artist, and how have you overcome them?
When I’m creating, I often become absorbed in the flow of making, following where the work seems to lead. The process can be intense, at times disorienting, and what unsettles me most is the sheer number of possibilities an artwork could take. In the end, I have to trust my instincts and let the work guide me. For me, the process is always a negotiation between restraint and excess, clarity and disorder — and it is within that tension that the work comes alive.
What do you hope people take away from your art when they experience it?
I like that people can see their own stories and memories in the images — that they recognize something of themselves within them. An image is never fixed; it can remain fluid, slipping between different meanings. I’m drawn to that tension between freedom and control, between the multiple ways a single image can be perceived. Within abstraction there is always a visceral pull, a sense of undoing and rebuilding. I want the viewer not simply to look at the work, but to find themselves caught inside its shifting spectacle.
Text & photo courtesy of Quan Lim
Website: https://quanlimstudio.com
Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/artbyquan/
