The Third Person in The Room: Vanessa Liem
Cuturi Gallery is delighted to present The Third Person in The Room, a homecoming solo exhibition by London-based Singaporean artist Vanessa Liem, opening 16 May in Singapore. Liem's first solo exhibition following the completion of her BA at the University of the Arts London, the show marks her return to Singapore after three years, bringing with it a new body of work completed in her Herne Hill studio that charts her artistic development during her time in the UK. The exhibition brings together paintings that map a cartography of visibility; tracing the many ways a body negotiates, resists, or surrenders to the consciousness of being seen.
At the heart of the exhibition lies a simple yet powerful premise: the viewer is not a passive observer, but an active presence. Liem's paintings are conceived with this awareness, the audience's gaze embedded as a condition within the work itself before they are even perceived. To stand before these canvases is to complete a triangulation: between artist, artwork, and the one who looks.
Across the exhibition, figures are choreographed in relation to an invisible yet insistent awareness of being watched. In A Crowded Place (2026), mirrors fragment and multiply the body within a bathroom setting – traditionally a space of intimacy – transforming it into a site of heightened self-awareness. The private becomes public, and reflections take on an almost physical presence, as though the room itself were inhabited by unseen witnesses.
This tension intensifies in Sunburnt (2026), where light bears down on a taut figure with punishing insistence. Here, illumination becomes a metaphor for scrutiny: both revealing and confining. Visibility is no longer neutral; it weighs upon the body, defining it while restricting its autonomy.
Liem’s work also gestures toward moments of release. In Together, in a warm feeling (2026), resting figures exist in a state of complete indifference to the outside gaze. Free from performance or self-consciousness, they embody a quiet withdrawal, suggesting that the most radical response to observation may be the absence of response altogether.
A persistent reddish warmth recurs throughout the works, creating a distinct visual language across the exhibition. Suggestive of flesh, veins, and the interiority of the body, each setting feels alive and continuous with the artist's own subjectivity. Whether situated in domestic interiors or more ambiguous settings, Liem’s environments function as extensions of her inner world; intimate, emotional landscapes saturated with the artist's emotions, insecurities, and relationships.
In naming the audience as the Third Person in the Room, Liem does not simply implicate the viewer. She asks them to sit with the discomfort, the pleasure, and the responsibility of both seeing and being seen.
Vanessa Liem (b. 2002, Singapore) received her BA from the University of the Arts London in 2025. Since first exhibiting with Cuturi Gallery at the outset of her practice, Liem's work has evolved from intimate psychological explorations into increasingly complex spatial and bodily negotiations with visibility. Her ethereal, airbrushed visual language, populated by biomorphic, dreamlike figures, draws from her personal experience of mental health and her interest in how observation shapes bodily awareness and agency. Referencing John Berger's Ways of Seeing and Wassily Kandinsky's distinction between "the internal" and "the external," Liem's paintings transform real environments into personified expressions of interior states. She was awarded Gold in the Emerging Category of the UOB Painting of the Year in 2019, and was named one of Prestige's 40 Under 40 in 2024.
