The Flood: Quan Lim
Cuturi Gallery is delighted to present The Flood, a solo show by Singaporean artist Quan Lim (b. 1996). In his first collaboration with the gallery, Lim explores the tension between self-preservation and collective existence, drawing on narratives of catastrophe. From Géricault’s Raft of the Medusa to flood myths across cultures, his paintings fuse abstraction with figuration to construct contemporary tableaus animated by instinct, conflict, and survival.
Influenced by the old master tradition of Goya and the baroque excess of Frank Stella, Lim layers gestural marks with recurring figures to create images that hover between coherence and dissolution. While flood myths describe destruction followed by cleansing and renewal, Géricault’s vision subverts this. Bodies are propped over one another as a result of struggle and survival, invoking the custom of the sea and the breakdown between self and other. To devour becomes a metaphor for the collapse of boundaries. To consume is not merely to survive but to become complicit in a ritual of destruction and rebirth, where one is swallowed, intertwined, and dissolved.
As in W. B. Yeats’s falcon turning from the falconer, Lim’s shapes are unmoored from order and blind to control. The titles, drawn from the poem The Second Coming, evoke not salvation but rupture. A monstrous birth displaces the expected return. This break extends into the present, echoing the absurd theatre of modern life. The spiral recurs as a form through which time and meaning unravel. As the poem declares, “Things fall apart; the centre cannot hold.” Within these scenes, the viewer finds no fixed center, only descent into chaos. The flood offers no redemption, only erosion, as meaning dissolves under the weight of history, desire, and unconscious drives. Rather than moral clarity, it brings a visceral undoing, where memory and myth tangle and linear time folds into the gyre.
Lim draws obsessively, letting forms surface from layered marks as if excavated from debris. His paintings speak of desire and its attendant shame—of catastrophe and renewal, moral decay and myth-making, the rise and collapse of collective illusions—and pose the question: what does it mean to endure when the waters never recede?
Quan Lim holds a BFA in Painting, summa cum laude, from the Maryland Institute College of Art, under a full scholarship. He was awarded first place in the 32nd UOB Painting of the Year as an Emerging Artist in 2013. His works have been exhibited in Singapore and the United States.
