UCCA is pleased to host H.H. LIM for his first solo show in China. LIM is a Malaysian artist of Chinese heritage currently living in Rome. He expresses his conceptual art through painting, installation and self performance. For his exhibition at UCCA, LIM designed a specific installation of fans hanging from the ceiling that slice through objects placed on top of columns and enthroned with various mixed media paintings hanging from the walls. His installation highlights his interest in, and critique of, the dissimilation inherent in the everyday living reality of consumerism.

LIM’s work here at UCCA will present his long-term art project developed to create a visible “site.” The exhibit is a natural continuation of his artistic research carried out with a keen sense of irony, aimed at a social body daily bombarded by the mainstream media. The exhibition is divided into three projects united by the same concept. A concept explored through a magnifying glass focusing on our speed of consumption and our physical and mental dependence upon it. The light glance towards our daily lives is the leitmotif of the exhibition. The tale of excessive consumption of objects, images and words is fed by the memory of our everyday living and by the craving for consumption. Through the eyes of art, the idea of amplifying the everyday routine becomes apocalyptic, as a scene from Coppola’s movie Apocalypse Now, in the center of the room, a wild wind storm breaks out in a sky populated by cars, household appliances and other ordinary objects. This surreal image is a metaphor describing how we continuously engulf goods, and directly communicates the sense of such meaning.

Despite living in and surrounded by Western culture and patterns of thought, LIM’s work still breathes a certain quality of Eastern philosophy. The visual objects he employs are not kept to a particular semantic meaning, but rather are reassigned as required by his artistic creations. Opposition between real objects and representations of those objects, between individual creativity and industrial-scale replication, constitutes an inherent conflict between the innate instrumentality of visual symbols and our established urge to appropriate them as we have understood them up to this point. There is a prominence of symbols that contains information in conflict with their visual use. What are people to make of their place in this world where symbolic language is re-appropriated for the logic of consumerism?