A pair of retrospective exhibitions of the work of Kim Lim (1936-97) and Teo Eng Seng (b. 1938), currently on view at the National Gallery Singapore (NGS), present a study in contrasts. The former is an exercise in contemplative calm while the latter is a blaring detonation that borders on the outré. Lim’s objects evince an austere formalism, a minimalist vocabulary that privileged spartan lines and simplified shapes; Teo’s practice embraced heterogeneous materiality that often mischievously, sometimes plaintively aimed at social life and prevailing ideologies, especially in his native Singapore. The shows are part of the museum’s “SG Artist” series, a showcase of voices that embody “global ambition and innovativeness of the Singaporean spirit”. Hyperbole aside, these exhibitions represent the most comprehensive surveys of their subjects to date.

Kim Lim: The Space Between. A Retrospective recuperates a once-overlooked figure. Singapore-born Lim, the daughter of a prominent barrister, decamped for London in her teens to attend art school. She lived the rest of her life in the United Kingdom, marrying renowned sculptor William Turnbull and establishing a flourishing career—she was, for instance, the only female artist included in the Hayward Gallery Annual in 1977—punctuated by occasional showings of her work in Singapore. After her untimely death at 61, her reputation was eclipsed both in her adopted home and the country she had long since left, neither of which seemed to regard knotty transcultural singularity, especially of feminine persuasion, with particular understanding.

In its emphasis on [Kim Lim’s] formal language, however, the exhibition glides over fundamental questions of identity and subjectivity.

The exhibition’s curators point out over email: “Lim died early and access to the larger body of her remaining works was only made available when they were unearthed with Turnbull’s passing in 2012. She also resisted framing an easy narrative around her works, particularly her identity, which meant that she was often left out of national art histories and survey exhibitions.” The present retrospective plugs a timely gap; her last institutional outing in this part of the world occurred in 1999 at the Singapore Art Museum and drew primarily from local collections.

It is her sculptures that rightfully take centre stage at NGS. Constituting the chief bulk of her oeuvre, these immaculate objects are oriented around a purity of material, line, shape and less frequently, colour – stringently and splendidly so. Works in wood from the middle of her career, in the 1970s, are especially compelling. Sculptures like Link III (1975), a series of blocks interspersed along a curved plastic structure and Stack (1976), a delicate edifice of adjoining slats, demonstrate her canny negotiation of structural and spatial concerns, from architectonic references to the possibilities of a blank wall. The exhibition foregrounds Lim’s extensive travels across Asia and Europe as an impetus for her visual grammar, putting pieces like Stack in dialogue with her photographs of the beams and brackets of the Horyu temple in Nara, Japan.

She is on record as noting that these trips provided significant “influence” on her output, but perhaps just as striking are the traces of her aesthetic education, both in the classroom and beyond. The linear contours of Constantin Brancusi had an abiding impact, from the prevalence of columnar configurations to streamlined silhouettes that suggest biomorphic forms. The importance of the base to Lim’s work, to the extent that sculpture and stand sometimes become indistinguishable—as is the case with Chess Piece I (1960) and Pegasus (1962)—echo Brancusi’s deployment of geometric units such as pyramids and cubes to build up what Scott Burton dubbed his “pedestal-tables”. Elsewhere, her use of colour in sculptures like Candy (1965) suggests the saturated palette of Anthony Caro, who taught her at Saint Martin’s in London, while Column (1971-72), a floor piece in stainless steel, seems to be engaged with the then-burgeoning idiom of Minimalism, collapsing the modularity and industrial look of Donald Judd’s Stacks series into Carl Andre’s preferred horizontal format.

Lim joins a growing number of female artists of the Asian diaspora who have been posthumously celebrated in recent years, including the likes of Ruth Asawa and Bernice Bing. In its emphasis on her formal language, however, the exhibition glides over fundamental questions of identity and subjectivity. The artist herself spurned these considerations, writing, “Race and gender were ‘givens’ I work from… but I did not want to make them an issue.” Yet, our cultural zeitgeist would likely disagree on the reasons for her relevance today. Her intersectional identities as a woman, immigrant and member of an ethnic minority, albeit one of some privilege, call for unpacking in relation to her practice. Feminism, for one, would insist on reading her work within gendered frames, acknowledging art world ecosystems and the writing of art history as sites of patriarchal prerogatives, inimical to autonomous female creativity (the fact that her Caucasian husband, who was 14 years her senior, enjoyed a more visible profile and legacy, would be grist for the mill here). Thankfully, the exhibition catalogue goes some way towards addressing the issue of these givens in Lim’s life, positing a sense of liminality, or “in-betweenness”, as a trope – a cogent start.

Teo Eng Seng, on the other hand, has remained a visible presence across Singapore’s art scene, being one of the recipients of the nation’s highest awards for the arts, the Cultural Medallion, in 1986. Hitchhiking his way to the UK as a young man in the early 1960s to attend the Central School of Art and Design in London, he worked for several years in a Savile Row textile company while going to classes at night. He eventually made his way back to Singapore in 1971 and spent the following decades as an art teacher at the United World College South East Asia. The NGS exhibition, titled Teo Eng Seng: We're Happy. Are You Happy? after an eponymous work from 1997 that depicts anthropomorphic birds confined to a cage, is surprising for several reasons: a garish, almost confrontational exhibition design—of a boldness rarely seen in museum offerings—and the revelation that the most engaging aspect of the artist’s oeuvre may not be his innovations in the medium of paper, for which he is famed.

Teo’s voice, in the post-independence landscape of Singapore’s art, is singular for its combination of humour and sharpness.

Teo’s exhibition, in a departure from the rigidly ascetic appearance of white cube spaces, is awash in wall-to-carpet red and black, with several works even surrounded by strips of lights laid into the floor. The immediate effect calls to mind a nightlife or theatrical venue rather than a site of cultural enlightenment, but the gambit, perhaps unexpectedly, pays off. It is a demonstration of potentially intrusive exhibition design to enhance the display of works of art, rather than detract from them. The curatorial team noted that the brief came from the artist, who asked them to “Do something different, something that you have not tried before.” The result, they remark, is “an exhibition design that resonated with the vibrancy of Eng Seng’s palette and the boldness of his experimental approaches… We wanted the exhibition to resonate with his larger-than-life personality.”

Another unanticipated outcome of the show is the fact that Teo’s experiments with materials, for which he is best known, are perhaps less engaging than his works that speak directly to the realities of life in post-independence Singapore – in ways droll, trenchant and sobering. Teo has been canonised for his invention of ‘paperdyesculp’, a form of paper mache that was utilised across a broad span of two and three-dimensional pieces beginning in the 1980s. In this respect, his most noted work is The Net (Most Definitely The Singapore River) (1986), the titular net interlaced with the flotsam and jetsam, here crafted from paperdyesculp, that was common to the river before it was cleaned up; the work was featured in the first book-length study of Singapore’s art history, Channels & Confluences, published in 1996.

However, paper mache as a medium, whatever possibilities it may offer the artist, does not seem especially noteworthy. What the exhibition makes clear, instead, is that Teo’s socially engaged pieces are far more persuasive and, ultimately, significant. Ah Wah and Ah Kiat: Crossing Borders (2001) is an installation of more than 200 diminutive figures on motorcycles, sculpted from concrete, that evokes lanes of congested traffic at the Causeway between Singapore and Malaysia, often touted as one of the busiest border crossings in the world. His homage to the numerous workers who brave the Causeway every day for economic reasons is an affecting ode to a demographic often taken for granted. Even more remarkable is the inclusion of the D Cell series (1987), a suite of sculptures that attempt to imaginatively recreate the confinement cell Teo’s sister was held in for several years. She was arrested during Operation Spectrum in 1987, in which the authorities rounded up a group of alleged Marxist conspirators aiming to overthrow the government and detained without trial under the Internal Security Act. Described by an art historian as ridden with “anger and anguish as well as a calm collectedness”, these works—almost four decades after the fact—are testament to an episode in Singapore’s history that remains unresolved for some. Teo’s voice, in the post-independence landscape of Singapore’s art, is singular for its combination of humour and sharpness. The aesthetic adventurousness of the NGS exhibition serves to highlight another crucial trait of his practice: a sense of experimentation and daring-do, no less vital for being overshadowed by other dimensions.

(Disclaimer: The views and opinions expressed here are those of the author(s) and do not necessarily reflect the official position of STIR or its editors.)

'Kim Lim: The Space Between. A Retrospective' and 'Teo Eng Seng: We're Happy. Are You Happy?' are on view at the National Gallery Singapore until February 2, 2025.