Charles Lim, SEA STATE 3

Life wouldn't be the same without safe seas.
We all take the sea for granted. But that wouldn't be
possible without the advanced naval technology that is
deployed around our shores. Take the multi-function radar
installed on our frigates. Conventional radar can only
help with surveillance. Multi-function radar also controls
the Aster anti-missile system and helps target aircraft and
low-flying missiles. In combat, when every second
counts, it makes all the difference. But what's the best
thing about this radar? It makes sure you don't even have to
think about the sea. Ever.
Singapore Navy advertisement, August 2011
CHARLES LIM
SEA STATE 2: as evil disappears
Future Perfect, Singapore
30 November - 9 December 2012
2
Charles Lim’s Informatic Naturalism: notes on SEA STATE 2
by David Teh
Unsteady State
Singapore’s awkward place in the region may be attributed to both the
“It seemed that there had been a reality there which
had not had any expression in art."
Tony Smith
ethno-political exclusion that pushed it toward statehood in the
mid-twentieth century, and to its prodigious economic empowerment
since. But its exceptional status may be waning, as continued growth
demands more cooperative relations with its land- and labour-rich
neighbours. The test-bed for this cooperation has been their shared
maritime space and its special industrial zoning, which Singapore
dominates.
To a newcomer, the story of Singapore contemporary art is dominated
by a performative mode that emerged around Tang Da Wu and the
Artists Village in the late 1980s, survived state suppression in the 90s,
and is currently being canonized in the form of solo museum shows.
But for today’s emerging artists, another current of experimentation
has been no less influential. With its own debts to Tang, this second
strand links the critical conceptualism of Cheo Chai-Hiang, Matthew
Ngui and Lim Tzay Chuen, via more discursive initiatives like Theatreworks’ Flying Circus Project (begun in 1996) or the Theatre Training
and Research Programme (from 2000). Amongst artists coming of age
in the 2000s, the stage and the body were receding as the privileged
sites of image-making, and for many, it seems a period of foreign
study was to prove at least as formative as any local developments.
Charles Lim Yi Yong graduated from Central Saint Martins College of
Art and Design in London, in 2001, but despite earning a string of
international accolades since, has thus far remained more of an
‘artist’s artist’ at home. Indeed, it is hard to find one in Singapore
that doesn’t admire him. But why has his rich and coherent body of
work received so little critical or curatorial attention? We cannot
remedy that here, but we might at least reiterate its thematic and
formal traits, in the hope of widening the understanding of Lim’s work
and its significance. For it may be that what is literal about his
methods has invited too literal an interpretation of their outcomes.
The sea made Singapore, and made it what it is, determined its birth
and its fortunes, and the nation’s heavy economic reliance on trade
and logistics is unlikely to change anytime soon. Charles Lim’s SEA
STATE project explores how Singaporean consciousness, and the
island’s impressive urban edifice, are structured by a hydrosphere and
maritime geography that have been all but erased from the national
imaginary and everyday experience. With his reiterative mapping of its
dynamic coastline, Lim scrapes away at the island’s gridded,
terraformed surface to uncover its uneasy maritime unconscious. 1
Over recent decades, reigning characterizations of Singapore have been
largely terrestrial, and less than fond. Next to William Gibson’s ‘Disneyland with the Death Penalty’, Rem Koolhaas’ ‘Potemkin Metropolis’, or
Cherian George’s ‘air-conditioned nation’, Lim’s unsentimental SEA
STATE series suggests a more neutral gaze. And yet it may be placed
within this genealogy of critical overviews, for it irritates anxieties just
as fundamental to the state and popular imagination. At a glance, the
project sustains a close focus on Singapore itself, on its unique
environment and its equally special environmental neuroses, with few
glimpses of the coastal idyll that marks a more sentimental regional
aesthetic. But at the same time, Lim takes a position outside of the
built environment and population that are such distinctive preoccupations of Singapore’s visual artists, oriented instead towards a
3
geophysical and historical context that indeed demands a wider
framing.
This stance was already well established in his celebrated early
collaboration with Woon Tien Wei and scientist Melvin Phua.
tsunamii.net (2001-05) was a geo-informatic dérive, transnational in its
scope, tracing the very physical infrastructure on which a prodigious
new virtual connectivity, brought about by digital telecommunications,
was based. This insistence on the geophysical constraints that shape
and limit economic activity is still a keynote of Lim’s practice. Indeed,
a guiding premise of the SEA STATE series is that the rationalization of
maritime space is never absolute. For water is more dynamic than land,
more entropic than even the jungle. Never neutral or passive, it
frustrates reification and concretization. The water in these straits
lubricates trade, but the same medium – warm, brimming with nutrients
– nourishes the fastest growing barnacles in the world, that slow it
down. (Their irrepressible growth is a subject of Lim’s ongoing
research.) And moreover, what is a benign environment for these
ancient constituents can be fatal for more evolved ones. For many,
especially migrants from non-seafaring cultures, it is brimming with
unseen and untimely deaths. As any sailor can tell you, the seas are
never ‘safe’.
Hence, perhaps, the special poignancy of this advert for the Singapore
Navy, an object-lesson in the architecture of popular fear. In many
places, naval PR is about adventure – adventures past and future –
tapping the romantic resources of the eternal sea. The Nation, in its
projection of a vigilant now, appropriates that forever. But here in
Singapore it is quite the reverse. The sea is a horizon of unspecified
threats, a domain of unquiet souls. And the promise of the state is not
its conquest, but its negation. (You don’t even have to think about the
sea. Ever.) The repressed idea of the sea, if not its image, belongs to
the prophylactic complex that guards a matrix of drip-fed, suburban
xenophobia.
For anthropologist Michael Taussig, the disappearance of the maritime
is a global phenomenon. Our societies are “utterly dependent,” he
writes, on ships and the sea, yet “nothing is more invisible”. 2 Our
connection with the sea has been reduced to leisure, to the ownership
of views, the phantasmatic enjoyment of ‘lifestyle’; the odd ship that
still anchors in a harbour, a mere “museum piece” put there for
authenticity. In Singapore this denial is especially acute: not only is the
sea thrust to the dim edges of the visible world, but waterways are so
disfigured that even our poetic uses for them are embarrassed – an
ever-receding coastline, the causeway choking the Straits of Johor, a
cauterized river that no longer reaches the sea.
For Taussig, the exiled sea returns in art. And photo-media practice in
Southeast Asia presents no shortage of examples. The native setting
of the trade and migration that have long shaped the regional socius
harbours stories of passage and encounter, of opportunity and loss, as
in Tan Chui Mui’s, South of South (2005), or Yee I-Lann’s Sulu Stories
(2006). This sea is by turns both benign and menacing: in Krisna
Murti’s Beach Time (2003), Muslim women lounge in gentle surf fully
clothed, insouciant despite the visible weight of their sodden garments;
while Wimo A. Bayang’s Ksatria Penghalau Gelombang (2006), shot on
the beach south of Yogyakarta, stages an absurd defiance of nature’s
inexorable forces, in the wake of a devastating tsunami. Alfredo and
Isabel Aquilizan have mobilized a whole visual vernacular of migrant
freight. Zai Kuning has salvaged the aural and oral heritage of the
orang laut; while Ho Tzu Nyen’s deconstruction of Singapore’s
foundation myths, Utama - Every Name in History is I (2003), finds on
the maritime horizon an unstable mirage of the past. These works, all
situated at the water’s edge, share a certain wistful outlook in which
the sea is an index of separation and loss, an agent of mobility or
erasure, of forgetting, of cleansing and renewal. Whether or not this
amounts to a maritime romanticism, we can say that for Southeast Asia’s
artists, the sea and its image are the province of the imagination.
5
By contrast, Lim’s sea is concrete and geometric, a solid, material
force of unyielding gravity. It does not narrate; it informs. It is not so
much subject matter, but a medium, in the biological, economic and
that eschews explanation or translation into language. If earlier
projects such as tsunamii.net and ‘SEA STATE 1: inside outside’ were
quite purposeful tracings of geo-informatic systems – ‘rigour’ is the
aesthetic senses of the word. This is not at odds with a certain
classical tradition – geo-centric, naturalistic, Aristotelian – for which
nature provides a set of standards: physical laws, proportions, a
geometry. But rather than designating an elementary order from which
a more complex one may emerge, Lim’s is a rogue or tropical
classicism, whose governing principle is not order, but entropy.
word he favours, citing Allan Sekula and the Bechers as inspirations 3
Towards an Informatic Naturalism
As an image, the sea has always been troubling and inspiring, an
empty x axis, bearing all the promise of the unknown, but also the
terror of no information. This tension was dramatized in a much
earlier classicism. For clarity of mood and message, nothing compares
to Claude Lorraine’s calm Arcadian pastorals. Perspective offered the
painter legibility, a smooth space for narrative order. But when such an
artist approached the sea, and the radiant void it reflects, he could
not but cram his shorelines with noise and detail, with a bustling
simultaneity that would be unbearable without colossal grids of
waterfront architecture. So intimidating was the restless infinity of a
maritime horizon, it would take another 150 years of technological
leaps, empirical studies of air, land and sea – the engineering of a
whole new modern subjectivity – before the Romantics could confront
its sublime vastness. If Lim’s signature figures (wide horizons, the
all-encompassing infinitude of jungle or ocean, lone figures adrift on a
vast sea) invite a romantic characterization, then his background as a
professional sailor ensures it. But his naturalism is not romantic. This is
nature with a twist: for Lim, nature is informatic.
By comparison with many of his peers, Lim’s work is strikingly nondiscursive, or at least, its discourse is an abidingly visual discourse, one
– then his recent work ventures beyond a documentary aesthetic
towards more automatic forms of inscription. This was announced at
the last Singapore Biennale by the exquisite longkang readymades in
his installation All the Lines Flow Out (2011) – giant netted socks
skirted with leaves, choked with the urban flotsam they pull from the
city’s canals. 4 Such gestures should not be mistaken for abstraction;
rather, they indicate a widening of his naturalism to encompass the
unconscious yet rule-bound inscriptions of the physis. A similar
automatism colours his short film, One Day I Forgot and Used My
Hands (2010), recorded without the lens of his digital camera, and
Rope Sketch (2012), a video study made by laying a long, thick rope
at the mercy of the currents in the Straits of Johor. This is no mere
metaphor for the dissolving or transgressing of borders. For what is
experienced in the image plane as a loosening of form is in fact a
quite literal transcription of the flux that envelops the two nations,
destined to frustrate the arbitrary, Cartesian geography that can only
temporarily keep them apart.
What would happen if a classical draughtsman were to take up a
digital video camera? With perspectival vision automated, naturalistic
depiction becomes a new starting point – a tabula rasa – rather than
a goal of representation. This could explain both Lim’s indifference to
the conventional picturesque, and his formal fastidiousness with the
digital apparatus. For there are structural parallels between physical
systems and information systems – the principle of entropy, for one
thing – and Lim’s work suggests that patterns, both natural and
man-made, micro and macro, analogue and digital, are for all their
differences somehow appreciable under the same logos. It’s all
information; the natural world corresponds with us. This is perhaps not
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so far from a kind of animism.
Notes
It’s worth remembering that Land Art, that most earthly of postwar art’s
turns, grew out of Conceptualism and Minimalism, probably its most
cerebral. It was also surely a response to a new sense of time realised
by electronic media, to the ensuing ubiquity of time-based images. But
it would be a mistake to think that with its predilection for monolithic,
1. Tony Smith’s oft-cited awakening on the unfinished New Jersey Turnpike
might just as well have been uttered by Lim, of Singapore’s largely unseen but
ceaselessly evolving coastal topography. The country’s denial of the maritime
has been summarized beautifully by Paul Rae in his ‘Singapore on Sea’, in
‘ISSUE: LAND’, Issue Art Journal, Vol. 1 (Singapore: LASALLE College of the Arts,
2012), 46-50.
organic form and raw, mineral materials, Land Art expressed some
counter-veiling aspiration to permanence. Its most celebrated examples
are proof to the contrary: nothing if not temporal, they are studies in
exposure; and it never took long for decay and transformation to make
their impression. Here also lies the irony that structures Lim’s poised
photographic surveys. Classically proportioned, forms are chosen and
rendered in the aesthetic of the timeless and the immovable – the epic
stability of the low barges lined up in their diligent work, great
pyramids of dredged sand, bleached by the unrelenting tropical sun –
but in fact nothing here is static. These too are ‘captures’ of
environments in flux.
Charles Lim’s informatic naturalism refutes a fundamental premise of
Singapore’s national consciousness, its programmatic denial of the
natural. It is in this sense that the work of this most unpolemical artist
is political, from start to finish. Not only is there nature here, but it’s
as natural as anywhere else, and it still conditions economic and
cultural life, strategic relationships, and social and national histories.
Whereas the state’s pragmatist dogma favours the absolute and a priori
instrumentalisation of the world, Charles Lim’s work reflects the beauty
and the danger of that total utility, and admits that the natural world
itself may be the ultimate author, drawing first-hand in our media of
inscription, as if in its own.
David Teh is Assistant Professor at the National University of Singapore,
and a director of Future Perfect.
2. Michael Taussig, ‘The Beach (a Fantasy)’ in Walter Benjamin’s Grave (Chicago
and London: University of Chicago Press, 2006), 98.
3. Jessica Anne Rahardjo, ‘Conversation with Charles Lim’, in Merewether (ed.),
op. cit., 42-45.
4. See Viviana Mejia, ‘All the lines flow out: Charles Lim’, Contemporary Visual
Art + Culture Broadsheet, 40.1, March 2011.
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CHARLES LIM YI YONG – Curriculum Vitae
b. 1973, Singapore
2002
2002
1999
“Lunar’s flow”, London Institute, Millbank, London, United
Kingdom
The 2nd Seoul International Media Art Biennale, Media City
Seoul, South Korea
“Nite-Lites”, Notting Hill Arts Club, London, United Kingdom
EDUCATION
1997
2001
Foundation, Chelsea College of Art and Design
BA fine Art Central Saint Martin’s School of Art and Design
(1st class honours) class of 2001
SELECTED GROUP/ INDIVIDUAL EXHIBITIONS – VISUAL ART
2012
2012
2011
2009
2008
2008
2007
2006
2005
2005
2005
2004
2002
2002
2002
SEA STATE 2: as evil disappears, Future Perfect, Singapore
The Singapore Show: Future Proof, Singapore Art Museum at
8Q, Singapore
Singapore Biennale - Open House 2011, Old Kallang Airport,
Singapore
Biennale Cuvee - Weltauswahl der Gegenwartskunst, O.K.
Centrum für Gegenwartskunst, Linz, Austria
Shanghai Biennale - Translocalmotion
BARNACLE 1: “it's not that I forgot, but rather I chose not to
mention”, AIVA, Japan
MANIFESTA 7 European Biennial of Contemporary Art, Trentino,
Italy
Islanded: Contemporary Art from New Zealand, Singapore and
Taiwan, Adam Art Gallery, Wellington
“Singapore Open Nature”, NTT Inter Communication Center,
Tokyo, Japan
“Space and Shadow”, Haus Der Kulturen Der Welt, Berlin,
Germany
President’s Young Talents Award, Singapore Art Museum,
Singapore
“Gravity: MAAP in Singapore”, Singapore Art Musuem, Singapore
tsunamii.net Documenta 11, Binding Brewery, Kassel, Germany
“Cyberarts: Intersections of Art and Technology”, Earl Lu
Gallery, LASALLE-SIA College of the Arts, Singapore
“Wait for Me”, Singapore Art Museum, Singapore
FILM FESTIVALS – SHORT FILMS
All the Lines Flow Out, 2011
2012
International Film Festival Rotterdam Official selection
Tribeca Film Festival Official Selection Documentary Shorts
Competition
Beijing Independent Film Festival
Nashville Film Festival Official Selection Experimental Shorts
Hong Kong Independent short film and video Awards (IFVA)
Official selection in Asian New Force competition
2011
Venice Film Festival Official selection in Orizzonti Competition
Dubai International Film Festival Official selection in Asia
Africa Muir competition
Collectif Jeune Cinema, France, Official selection
One Day I forgot and used my hands, 2011
2011
Edinburgh International Film Festival Official Selection
Tribeca Film Festival in Competition
International Film Festival Rotterdam Film Festival Official
Selection
Wrong Turn, 2007
2007
Singapore Short Cuts Official Selection
RESIDENCIES AND AWARDS
2012
Qwatz, artist-in-residency program, Rome
2011
Arts Creation Fund, National Arts Council Singapore
2007-08
SCAN artist in residence, Theatreworks, Singapore
2008
AIVA residency with Japan Foundation trails Japan
2007
Mentor for DASARTS BLOCK 20, Amsterdam, The Netherlands
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RESIDENCIES AND AWARDS
SELECT BIBLIOGRAPHS
2005
- Bentkowska-Kafel, A., Cashen, T., and Gardiner, H., Digital Visual Culture:
Theory and Practice. Chicago: Intellect Books / University of Chicago Press,
2009.
2004
2002
2002
1998
10th Anniversary TheatreWorks’ FLYING CIRCUS PROJECT, The
Black Box, Fort Canning Centre, Singapore
Switchmedia, Chiangmai, Thailand
Resident Artist, New Media, Walker Art Center, Minneapolis, USA
USA CCRI Resident Artist
Singapore Sports Council, full scholarship to study fine art at
Central Saint Martins College of Art and Design, London, United
Kingdom
GROUPS FOUNDEDS
tsunamii.net
p-10
Bobbing Buoy Films Pte. Ltd
ART/FILM AWARDS
2012
2012
2012
2011
2005
2002
“Experimental Innovation Award”, Beijing Independent Film
Festival
“Best Experimental Short”, Nashville Film Festival
“Silver Award”, Asian New Force Category, 17th IFVA Awards,
Hong Kong
“Special Mention”, Venice Film Festival Official selection in
Orizzonti Competition
President’s Young Talents Award
JCCI Arts Award
FILM PRODUCTION
2011
2012
2011
2010
2010
Art Director, “Forever”, feature film directed by Wee Li Lin,
supported by the MDA’s New Feature Film Fund
Cinematographer, “Singapore Country”, short documentary
directed by Wee Li Lin for NLB’s Singapore Memory Project
Cinematographer, “Let’s talk about it”, commercial directed by
Wee Li Lin and written by Haresh Sharma for KKH Hospital
Cinematographer, “Under the Sun”, video installation/short film
directed by Wee Li Lin and written by Jean Tay for National
Arts Council’s Arts Creation Fund
Cinematographer, “Mother’s song”, short film directed by Zippy
Kimundu and written by Wee Li Lin for NYU-Tisch Asia
- Catching, Rebecca. “Translocal Motion Sickness: Shanghai Biennale Gone off
the Rails?” in Contemporary Visual Art and Culture Broadsheet. Vol. 40.1, March
2011.
- Ho, Rui An. “All the Lines Flow Out”, Cinémathéque Quarterly. Singapore:
National Museum of Singapore, Oct-Dec 2012.
- Leanza, Beatrice (ed). THE HUMAN FACTOR - Rethinking Relationality (or the
Artist as Bricoleur). Rome: Cura Books, 2012.
- Mejia, Viviana. “All the lines Flow Out” in Contemporary Visual Art and Culture
Broadsheet. Vol. 40.1, March 2011.
- Merewether, Charles (ed). “SEA STATE 2: As Evil Disappears in “ISSUE: Land”.
Annual Art Journal, Vol. 1, 2012.
- Rahardjo, Jessica Anne. “Conversation with Charles Lim” in “ISSUE: Land”.
Annual Art Journal, Vol. 1, 2012.
- Tan, Guo-Liang. “Charles Lim” in Singapore Biennale 2011 Open House
(exhibition catalogue). Singapore: Singapore Art Museum, 2011.
- Singapore Art Museum. “alpha 3.8: tsunamii.net translocated”, 2003.
LIST OF WORKS
SEA STATE 2: as evil disappears, 2012
C-prints on diasec, digital print, and marine charts; dimensions variable
Ed. 3 + 1 AP
Untitled (Study), 2012
3-D rapid prototype print; 220 x 150 x 28mm
SEA STATE 2: drift (rope sketch 1), 2012
Single-channel HD digital video; c. 10min
SEA STATE 2: drift (stay still now to move), 2012
2-channel HD digital video, c. 20min
Ed. 3 + 1 AP
Future Perfect is a contemporary art gallery located in
Singapore’s new art precinct, Gillman Barracks. Working with an
international roster of artists, the gallery also provides
research and advice for institutions and collectors, drawing on
its directors’ extensive experience in contemporary art from
Asia, Australia and beyond.
For more information or to make an appointment, contact Viviana
Mejía on +65 9835 8271 or email viviana@futureperfect.asia
16 October - 9 December 2012
The Singapore Intensive is an 8-week programme of exhibitions
and discussions initiated by Future Perfect to spotlight the
work of local artists and deepen the understanding of their
work. The platform is supported by the National Arts Council,
and aims to open new channels for engagement with Singaporean
contemporary art.
This exhibition has been realised with the support of the National
Arts Council, Singapore, through the Arts Creation Fund.