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| H.H. Lim, between Ego and Tao |
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text by Angelo Capasso
H.H. Lim’s works always run the historical path through again, that brought about this evanescence of art’s traditional subject - representation – starting from the performance art he practised at the outset of his career as an artist.
Lim’s works mark the territory with objects that are merely a signal of presence. His small objects, such as plaster airplanes, dustbins, bottles, cruets and totems made with telephone directory, are the signals of a path that conciliates object and thought, and the latter, by rooting in the ephemeral, freely gets practice in the perfect ontological void of the show room. An example of this is “Thinking cage”, a chair placed in front of a cage containing an egg, the artist exhibited in a show, organised by myself, that intended to reconstruct Achille Bonito Oliva’s historical work at San Benedetto del Tronto and was entitled “ABO: the arts of criticism” (San Benedetto del Tronto, Ascoli Piceno, 2001).
Those objects are tridimensional and bidimensional (wall) presences occupying everyday space, conferring it the condition of a temporary museum by the delicacy and preciousness of the image they give of themselves in their new cloth silvered, gilded or covered with a thin aluminium foil. This foil performs the important task of maintaining the common within a protected atmosphere, like in a self-contained and unassailable Limbo.
Lim, for his mental wanderings, refers to the Museum meant as archives and place of memory. Thus, also his “mirrors” are not made of leaded glass, but of aluminium plates that are able to reflect shadows, and not neat shapes, in an opalesque and pale dimension of antiquity nearing contemporaneity to traditional art and handwork to thought.
Yet, Lim’s Museum, like Warhol’s, tends to consecrate the common. “Today, going into a supermarket is like going into a museum”, Andy Warhol said, that is: the sacred rigour with which mass consumer goods are classified associates culture with goods. The encounter of the scared with the common unavoidably produces kitsch by-products because it is impossible to fill up the gap existing between the worship of the sacred and the perishability of the common.
The transformation process performed by Lim in this regard consists of using objects as exercise tools of a minimal philosophy that has some closeness to Zen anecdotage and a Tao philosophy reinterpreted through the artist’s individual fable-related imagination. Within such fable-like exercise the common undergoes its levitation and nears the divine in a medium-height encounter.
The titles of his works often contain a first interpretation key that does not classify nor clearly define the works’ borders, but stresses their transient mobility. “For heaven’s sake”, for instance, is a phrase which can express love of flying, love of God or, on the other hand, fear or despair – conciliating opposite poles, as in Lim’s works Buddhist or Hinduist gods are juxtaposed with weapons or racing cars. “A Shadow of Doubt”, “Appr. 60 Kilos of Wisdom”, “The Way” are titles which might be given, like philosophical theorems, to many a work. In “Appr. 60 Kilos of Wisdom”, a work shown during the international exhibition “Art Tribes” organised by Achille Bonito Oliva (Rome, 2001), the artist himself is hovering on a basket ball. The reference to Tao is always overt, and through such philosophical discipline it maintains an unchangeable opening of Lim’s operational space towards The Way.
Thus, as to the materials used for the last series of works, it occurs that the mirroring and then white landscape of former works is transformed into a black horizon in the works proposed by Lim for the show, organised by myself in the Zelig Gallery in Bari (Polignano a Mare, Bari, 2001) entitled “Lim, between Ego and Tao”, where enamel black is not the comfort for a conceptual interpretation of his work, but self-evidence of black itself as an autonomous expression calling for sight, and not for vision, because the first is necessary and indispensable for any personal interpretation and, hence, for any more absolute vision. “Now you can see with your own eyes”, Lim says, after having stated – in a former cycle of works - that “to have eyes in one’s mind leads to blindness.
Within the empty physical space the artist goes out of his Ego and enters his Self where his universal being is terminated and finds again the words of time, the wisdom of place and form, the ascent to the space of art because they coincide within this space/time. The passage from form to exhalation of form is a constant in Lim’s art and confirms itself in “letting oneself go” to a void of pure images and associate sensations, to respond to the plenty of the civilisation of images and find the way to a conciliation between Ego and Self. This is the essence of the search in this great anthological show conceived for Taipei and entitled “Inside the pit I look at the sky”. The title of this exhibition is also emblematic for his way of living everyday life and his very peculiar relation to art. It is Lim’s choice to watch the world through a privileged space, as an exile (emigrated and reintegrated in a new civilisation), from bottom upwards, from a special window (as his Roman window, from which his look dominates the whole Piazza Vittorio Emanuele, the capital’s multiethnic district) allowing him to watch the future through the wisdom of the past and the spurious naivety of the present.
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