Future Perfect presents ‘SEA STATE 3: inversion’, the latest installment of Charles Lim’s celebrated SEA STATE series and the first exhibition of the gallery’s 2014 programme. Timed to coincide with Art Stage Singapore, the exhibition throws an international spotlight on one of this country’s leading artistic innovators.
'SEA STATE 3: inversion’ will feature a major new sculptural installation based on surveys of the sea floor around Singapore. Far from the wilderness we might imagine there, the artist finds a dynamic and ever-changing environment, constantly reshaped by natural and human forces. Using 3-D print technology, Lim turns this obscure world upside down, revealing an unseen landscape where the nation’s economic fortune is secured.
Modern Singapore is a land of inversions. Its transformation from swampy entrepot to post-modern metropolis has seen hills become plains and sea become land, while transport and commerce reach underground and gardens climb skyward.
With the economic miracle comes peculiar environmental side-effects: polar bears in the jungle; stability in the midst of tropical flux; an alpine ecosystem at sea-level, in an airconditioned greenhouse on the equator.
Charles Lim’s new body of work examines the principle of inversion at the heart of the developmental state. While Singapore is heavily dependent on the maritime economy, the sea has all but disappeared from the public imagination, as the island has grown by some 30% since independence. With ‘SEA STATE 3: inversion’, the artist explores the unseen horizon of this expansion, performing an expert tracing of the nation’s political and psychological contours.
About the artist:
Charles Lim sees Singapore like no other artist. As a former professional sailor, his senses are keenly attuned to environments we rarely see, to forces most of us do not even notice. His early collaborative project, tsunamii.net, traced the hidden submarine infrastructure that underpins our global computer networks. Recalling the excursions of the Land Art movement of the 1970s, his ambitious SEA STATE project scrutinizes both natural and man-made systems, opening extraordinary new perspectives on our everyday surroundings, from unseen and alien landscapes, arbitrary borders and disappearing islands, to the imaginary boundaries of a future landmass. After sailing for Singapore in the 1996 Olympics, Lim studied Fine Art at Central Saint Martins School of Art and Design, London, graduating in 2001. The following year he participated (with tsunamii.net) in Documenta11 in Kassel, Germany. His SEA STATE series is an ongoing body of work that has been exhibited at Manifesta 7 (2008), the Shanghai Biennale (2008), and the Singapore Biennale (2011). Recent stages of this project have been presented at the Dojima River Biennale 2013 in Osaka, Japan, and in Rendezvous 13 at the Institut d'art contemporain Villeurbanne, alongside the Lyon Biennale. Lim’s moving image works have been screened in international film festivals at Rotterdam, Tribeca and Edinburgh. His multi-award-winning short film, All The Lines Flow Out, premiered at the 68th Venice Film Festival, winning a Special Mention, the first award ever won there by a Singaporean production.
-Future Perfect
Image: © Charles Lim
