It begins with two separate canvases; each receives an underpainting of a sunlit sky. A masking layer—here, a machine-cut vinyl sticker that traces the intersecting network of lines of human skin seen up close—is carefully laid over the underpainting, as if a kind of veil. Subsequent layers of paint, still depicting the same sunlit sky, are gradually added to the stencil’s pliant surface until the paint itself gains enough body. Later, another image, now a much darker sky, is painted across the entire canvas, covering both the stencil and the brightness underneath, like a conjured sunset. Once dried, the stencils are peeled off, the built-up layers of paint removed and merged together, forming a third piece of artwork, while the two canvases now carry traces of both bright and dark skies.

This may read as a long-winded way of arriving at a pair of paintings, but the artist Lou Lim has been devising ways of collapsing the methodologies of sculpture and painting for some time now. For her, finishing a painting is usually not the end but just a halfway point—the moment when the pivotal stage of the narrative begins. Never concerned with merely creating a pretty picture, she approaches a finished canvas like a field to be mined, extracting materials and creating meaning from the very act of taking away.

Lim’s practice lives within the tension between opposing forces and elements: additive versus subtractive, positive versus negative, embedding versus extracting, painting versus sculpture, near versus far, body over landscape. With each new body of work, she labors to complicate and further nurture this tension, without favoring one side over the other. What emerges is a kind of hybrid, self-reflexive approach, anchored in process. When one comes across Lim’s works, one may notice a picture plane marked by incisions, as if a sentient surface wounded in the process and later bearing scars. Skin—near and personal—brought to the scale of the heavens, distant, vast, and all-encompassing.

Words by Gary-Ross Pastrana

Lou Lim (b. 1989) invests in the connection between the corporeal and the spiritual, between materiality and notions of permanence, between objects and visual imagery, and in what these relations articulate. Her works examine and appropriate the processes of different art forms to further investigate sculpture, creating new contexts for the familiar by exploring ideas and potentialities of surface and touch.

Lim earned her BFA from the University of the Philippines College of Fine Arts and has been actively exhibiting work since 2011. Recent exhibitions include solo presentations “For the Land that Laments” at Silverlens Galleries and “Rest” at CCP in 2022. She was resident at Palais de Tokyo in Paris under the Pavillon Neuflize OBC 2015-2016 program. This participation resulted in a collaborative performance at the Opera Garnier and in group exhibitions at ICA Singapore and the Seoul Museum of Art in South Korea, as well as in a publication with INA [Institut National Audiovisuel]. She was a recipient of the Cultural Center of the Philippines Thirteen Artists Awards 2021.