Hannah Lim's sculptures collide myth and mysticism to reimagine the ornamental objects of history.
When elements of myth are appropriated, they are often stripped of their cultural context and significance, reducing hallowed stories to mere aesthetics or trendy artefacts of tradition. This not only dilutes the essence of these myths but also perpetuates underlying power imbalances as dominant cultures exploit and trivialise the more sacred elements of custom, skewing our perception of historical and cultural realities. This is just one way meaning can be embedded into objects, how histories can materialise, and how they can be destroyed.
The myth of the tiger's eye — a stone with a lustre of silky golden honey — was said to have begun in ancient Egypt, where craftsmen used the stone in their deity statues to represent divine vision and believed it protected the sun and earth; or perhaps it started in ancient Rome, whose soldiers wore engraved gems to protect them in battles; or from any number of various ancient cultures who believed the stone could ward off the evil eye and its curses, and keep the wearer safe from malefic urges that lurk on the edge of our understanding.
But maybe myth isn't the right word: it's more like superstition, imbued with the same wishful animism as the mottled fur of a rabbit's severed foot, or the soft, anxious raps of knuckles onto hard wood. We have to force our desires, our worries, our secret hopes and hope-nots into objects to stop them from crawling uninvited into our dreamspace or — maybe worse — mixing drunkenly with our waking life; like eye floaters, these visions are self-inflicted but no easier to just rub away. Write them in your tear-soaked diary, seal them into crystals and salts, or better yet find a lockbox and throw away the key: drop it in the ocean, into a volcano, down your open throat.
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Hannah Lim's work swims through these murky waters of myth, mysticism, and material culture; koi share ponds with seraphs and herons breathe the same talced air as chimera, reinterpreting stories and spaces where ancient motifs from both Medieval and Chinese bestiaries swim and slither under the same celadon skies, reclaiming agency for objects historically caught in the mercantile web of Western consciousness. Her work disrupts traditional narratives, turning the tables on the "sovereign Western consciousness" that once viewed Asia as an "image of the other," or worse, a surrogate self. These sculptures, frosted with an enchanted vibrancy, reimagine a medium that until now could only ever be merely ornamental.
"I suppose I came to sculpture almost by chance," Hannah tells me, reflecting on her journey. "I used to make small sculptures in my teenage years, but it wasn't until my foundation year that I truly committed to the medium." This shift from painting and drawing to sculpture was spurred by a tutor who saw something in her work, a latent potential that found its full bloom in three dimensions. It was as if the creatures and forms that had lived in her sketches needed to step out into the world, to inhabit space in a way that only sculpture could allow.
The multicultural confluence of her background inevitably informed this evolution of Lim's work. "My dad is Singaporean Chinese, and my mum's British, so I've always been fascinated by how these two cultures intersect," she explains. This mining of her own braided identity led her to explore chinoiserie, an 18th-century design trend steeped in both aesthetic beauty and colonial exploitation. "Chinoiserie is very Rococo in style, but also quite anthropomorphic with its arms and legs, flamboyant and extravagant. I was drawn to it for its playful elements, but also because of the colonial practices that allowed this design trend to flourish."
Yet, Lim is not content to simply recreate, but through a specific, hungry reclamation, she found a way to reconnect with the Chinese heritage she didn't fully experience growing up in the UK. It's a reclamation not just of aesthetic, material forms but of the stories and myths that those forms have long contained — also deeply influenced by the concept of Ornamentalism, a feminist theory of East and Southeast Asian personhood laid out by scholar Anne Anlin Cheng. "I've been thinking a lot about how ornamental objects have historically reflected and defined women, particularly Asian women," Lim notes, "this comparison to porcelain and fragile objects," a reflection that led her to examine her own relationship with ornamental objects, seeing them as contiguous extensions of her racialised body — often unresurrectable from the weight of their histories, fetishised and reduced to the voluble silence of mere surface.
Ornament and maximalism have, in recent history, been pushed to the peripheries of taste, dismissed by modernist critics as excessive, frivolous, even degenerate. But just to deride ornament as clutter, or an overindulgence, is to ignore its ability to speak in forgotten tongues on the undercurrents of culture and identity. Cheng writes, "Aesthetics is a language about the ineffable and the contradictory. It makes room for the historical, the imaginative, and the phantasmagoric. What people don’t realise is that race and gender are such complicated phenomena that straddle the material and immaterial, that we desperately need the realm of art and literature to help with a vocabulary." Ornament, for Lim (with work confected, adorned, and intricate), isn't just an embellishment in an austere industry that increasingly seeks to flatten and simplify the complex, but an assertion against the notion of ornament as something prosthetic and superfluous, to be erased or muted. It's unapologetic in that sense; in a culture that often devalues the decorative, Lim finds meaning in the loud, the layered.
As our conversation winds down, I ask Hannah about the fantastical worlds that her sculptures seem to inhabit. Does she envision these worlds as she creates, or do they form organically around her pieces? "It's a bit of both," she admits. "Sometimes I start with a specific story or motif, but the work often evolves as I go along. I'm fascinated by Chinese and medieval mythology, especially the way creatures and ideas from these vastly different cultures can intersect and inform each other." Her sculptures and watercolours do exist in this state of fluidity, smudging the lines between the known and the unknown. This ambiguity is intentional, a way for Lim to invite the viewer into their own reading of the work, without it being solely defined by colonial ties. "I like the idea that people can interpret my work in different ways," she says. "There's something exciting about creating forms that look familiar but aren't entirely distinguishable. It allows viewers to project their own meanings onto the work."
This playfulness, this intentional blurring of boundaries, extends to the way Lim interacts with the materials she uses. Her pieces are often adorned with vibrant glazes that give them a chatoyant otherworldly glow, like a cat's citrine eye catching the wet light of a dark room. They are objects that petition to be touched, to be handled with care, and yet they also possess an air of the untouchable, as if they might slither out of your grasp if you reach for them too quickly, or recoil like the wilt of a flower petal at night. In a way, it's this aspect of Lim's work that is most about reimagining the world itself — a world where the boundaries between East and West, past and present, real and imagined, are molten and ever-changing. It's an invented, mercurial world where mythologies fluently leak into bruisable realities, where ornamental objects are breathing, pulsing, fleshy, with feelings of their own, and where every piece of art is at once both familiar and strange, both a question and an answer.
A glimpse of silver thread on the river's skin. A shadow dancing just beyond the reach of claws. A secret buried in lightning's silent roar and fading with the last, heaving sigh of thunder.
What has caught the tiger's eye, I wonder?
