Solo Exhibition

Imperceptible: machine, animal, plant, stone, skull

Roski Mateo Gallery
1262 Palmetto Street, Los Angeles, CA 90013
July 2 – 10, 2021
https://roski.usc.edu/events/hings-lim-0

Imperceptible: machine, animal, plant, stone, skull imagines becoming not as a transitory state, but as a condition. Working in sculpture and video, interdisciplinary artist Hings Lim dilates objects and technologies in order to explore interrelational subjectivities beyond the dialectics of self and other, human and nonhuman, and culture and nature. In this body of work, Lim rethinks apparatuses, testing the bounds of materiality and performativity as a means of meditating upon the unfathomable past and the elusive future. Drawing upon ritual and phantasmagoria, Lim interrogates the spaces between in order to consider becoming not as a linear progression but as multiplication. A profusion of ancient and imagined objects—tools, relics, spatial maps—echo to construct the artist’s version of a rhizome, but ultimately, rather than attempting to concretize the multiplication of spatiality and temporality that defines this body of work, Lim offers the ghostly as a metaphor for the concerns at the core of his practice: imperceptible unless sought. 

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In Imperceptible: machine, animal, plant, stone, skull, Hings Lim uses installation, sculpture, image, performance, and place to propose a rumination on the space between human and nonhuman. Underlying this body of work are the varied cultural and spiritual influences present in his home region of Southeast Asia. Lim employs technology, alternate reality, ritual, and artifact as mechanisms that expose and explore a specific liminality. This liminality, however, is not static, but rather, constantly moving and essential to the in-flux and cyclical nature of becoming.

The subtitle, machine, animal, plant, stone, skull alludes to the material objects and semiotics that Lim both, challenges the limitations of and draws inspiration from. The works throughout the exhibition are performing in space by revealing their own individual and interrelation subjectivities. A carefully crafted biface candle, flickering in the wind; a haunting, yet unimposing hominid skull, floating in mid-air; a digitally-rendered tree sharing the stories of the land, come together as meditations on the entangled relationship between technology, nature, and ghost. Shadows, lights, sounds, and performativity manifest as immaterial and intangible, yet undeniably present within the gallery. Lim gazes towards both the future and the past by collapsing, and simultaneously zooming-in on the concept of time. In doing so, through this exhibition he gives way to reconsiderations of linearity, evolution, death, and perception.

Imperceptible: machine, animal, plant, stone, skull offers viewers (im)material and (dis)embodied touchstones on which to reflect and constellate between, while ultimately gesturing towards new possibilities for sensing (non)human subjectivity through time and space.

Curated by Carlo Tuason and Kate Rouhandeh.

Download Press Release and Work List