May 2012
qwatz contemporary art platform hosts the artist Charles Lim Yi Yong, from Singapore (1973), as part of the project ‘The Human Factor’. He studied at Central Saint Martins and Chelsea College of Art and Design (London), while serving as a professional sailor for the Singapore National Sailing team between 1992 and 2000.
Lim’s work expounds upon the mutuality between man and environment to investigate the interrelation of material and intangible systems of order and power created wherein. Conventional spatial paradigms of containment are deconstructed to reveal the fragilities and inconsistencies of both virtual and physical instruments of control. In 2001 he co-found the net-art collective tsunamii.net with Tien Wei Woon and Melvin Phua, a collaborative team that has generated technologies, and relevant experiences, probing the ethereal, immaterial nature of the internet. As the group disbanded in 2004, Lim embarked on an ongoing series of narrative experiments employing photography, video and performance under the title ‘Seastories’. Set to conflate the idea of borders by reversing the geography of the sea and the land, these progressive enactments reference the regional politics of Singapore, the island state, as they take shape in a sensuous cinematography of life cycles, decay and regeneration.
Charles Lim has received important awards among which the JCCI Arts Award in 2002 and the President’s Young Artists Award in 2005. His work has been presented in international large scale exhibitions and institutions such as Documenta 11 (2002), Haus Der Kulturen Der Welt, Berlin (2005), Manifesta 7 and the Shanghai Biennale both in 2008 and the Singapore Biennale in 2001. His short movies have been screened at the Rotterdam Film Festival (2010), the Tribeca Film Festival (2011, 2012) and the Venice Film Festival (2011), where he received a special mention for the work All the Lines Flow Out (2011).
Charles Lim’s residency, in collaboration with Archiviazioni and O’ A.I.R. residencies programs, has been possible thanks to the support of FARE, RESIDENZAITALIA 2011, and the grant they offered to the artist-in-residence programs which are part of the network artinresidence.it, a platform dedicated to residency programs for artists and curators, in Italy and abroad, created by FARE in collaboration with Open Care and the support of Fondazione Cariplo, NABA – Nuova Accademia di Belle Arti, GAI – Associazione Circuito Giovani Artisti Italiani.
Image: Charles Lim, ‘Sea state 1: inside outside’.