Lim Heejae Solo Exhibition
Snake In The Garden, 2025
Poster︎︎︎
594 × 841mm
Following the title of her solo exhibition, Snake in the Garden, one might step into the gallery and search for a snake within the unfolding scene in Diorama of a Bird of Paradise (2025). A bird with an elongated tail, wings angled downward in descent, small birds nesting between bent branches—while it may seem to infer the possibility of a snake, none ever appears. This absence is both a strategy and a metaphor. Instead of reproducing or recording reality, Lim reflects on painting’s position within the contemporary condition of images, imagining transitions from one frame to another—almost like a screen. The viewer’s gaze reaches the surface of the canvas before it reaches the forms portrayed upon it, and her paintings dismantle and reassemble the instant in which the eye perceives such forms and assigns meaning. The moment a viewer realizes the absence of any such snake, the trust they placed in the title begins to fracture; one is released from the expectation of faithful representation. The relationship between Tree of Stuffed Hummingbirds (2024), painted from photographic references, and the new work A Charm of Stuffed Hummingbirds (2025), which draws on but unbinds itself from depiction by emphasizing motion and inter-image mobility, reinforces the logic of the world she has been constructing. What matters is the state of being charged with movement, the premise that an image might slip into another frame at any moment. It is here that we recognize her long-standing approach: the decision to reach painting by way of taxidermy, the way in which she maneuvered her brush to achieve this manner of articulation.
(...)
Returning once more to painting: translating specimens from a European natural-history cabinet into painting, adopting the format of medieval triptychs, using phrases unfamiliar within Korean linguistic tradition as titles—these are among Lim’s favored strategies of summoning practices she has no personal experience with. Such gestures strip away historical context and the comforts of inherited conventions, leaving only the outer skin. Clearing away the weight accumulated under the name of painting, erasing the ease offered by tradition, and replacing everything with the fluid image that slips between screens, this act, this exhibition, may ultimately be read as a confession of how Lim Heejae relates to painting itself.
Text extracted from ‘The Snakeless Snake Painting, Slipping Images’ by Jihyun Shin (Curator)
Lettering︎︎︎
S, L, ej, k, G, Th, r, d
