Eugenia Lim works across video, performance and installation to explore nationalism and stereotypes with a critical but humorous eye. Lim invents personas to explore alienation and belonging in a globalised world. Her work has been exhibited, screened and performed at the TATE Modern, Dark MOFO, Melbourne Festival, Next Wave, GOMA, ACMI, Asia TOPA, firstdraft, Artereal Gallery, FACT Liverpool and EXiS Seoul. She has been artist-in-residence with the Experimental Television Centre NY, Bundanon Trust, 4A Beijing Studio and the Robin Boyd Foundation.
In addition to her solo practice, collaboration and community are important to Lim’s work. Lim co-founded Channels Festival, was the founding editor (and current editor-at-large) of Assemble Papers and co-founded temporal art collective Tape Projects (2007–2013).
Gertrude Gallery Coordinator, Siobhan Sloper, spoke to Eugenia about her practice and upcoming projects.
Siobhan Sloper: First of all let me say welcome to the Gertrude Studio Program, we’re very excited to have you here and to see your projects evolve over the next two years. You’re working on a project at the moment called The Australian Ugliness, can you tell me a little about this?
Eugenia Lim: Thanks, I'm glad to be here. My project The Australian Ugliness (TAU) is an exhibition and public program that looks at the ethics and aesthetics of Australia today. I'll present it this July as part of Open House Melbourne. TAU takes its name from a polemic book by modernist architect Robin Boyd in which he critiqued the love of surface, veneer,featurism and 'she'll be right' attitudes of our national identity. More than 50 years on, while our tastes and cultural awareness have become more sophisticated, much of what Boyd rallied against - cultural cringe, mistreatment of Aboriginal Australians and our underlying racism and anxiety about who we are and our place in a global context - still I think, defines us. My work is a three-channel video installation which is filmed in Australian cities and suburbs (not all of them - my budget wouldn't stretch that far!) and features 'the Ambassador', my gold-suited performance persona. Icons like Jørn Utzon's Sydney Opera House and Tao Gofers' Sirius Building, through to private homes like Gottlieb House by Wood Marsh are activated and 'othered' by myself and a small cast of performers. I guess I'm interested in questions like: who has the right to the city? Who designs our public and private spaces, and who are they for? How does contemporary architecture address or accommodate people of colour, women, queer and non-binary people, students and the working class? It's the first time I've made a multi-channel video of this scale, and I'm currently working with local architecture wunderkinds WOWOWA on bright yellow installation (based on a 1970's fish and chips shop by Robin Boyd) to house the work - a kind of utopian womb pavilion for the audience's viewing pleasure.
SS: Sounds like a great project, I look forward to seeing it. Gold is a repeated motif in a number of your projects (Yellow Peril, 2015; Shelter, 2015;Artificial Islands (Interior Archipelago), 2017 and The People’s Currency, 2017). What’s your fascination with it?
EL: I first 'struck' gold when I was making my project Yellow Peril. I was researching my family's experience of migration from Singapore to Australia, which happened in the 1970s during the White Australia Policy and at the same time, the history of the Chinese diaspora and migration to this country. I was looking at the gold rush in the mid 1800s, and the influx of Chinese who came to the goldfields of Victoria and New South Wales to seek their fortunes. There was a deep fear of the Chinese from European miners – there was riots and killings directed at the Chinese and this resentment ultimately led to the Immigration Restriction Act (1901), which aimed to prevent the Chinese from entering Australian borders. I was interested in how within the foundation of Australian democracy: the right to vote and the Federation of Australia was also entwined this racism and fear of the 'yellow peril'. The first act passed by the new parliament was the Immigration Restriction Act. So within dominant narratives and histories of nationalism and democracy, how do we talk about and give voice to the Chinese, First Nations people, women and those who were marginalised? Gold became important as a metaphor and material to start to do this, a kind of symbolic 'shorthand'. The gold emergency blankets that I continue to use in my work have a duality about them that I love: they are both symbols of survival, but of fragility and crisis. Gold stands for 'gold fever', a symbol that fluctuates in value on a daily basis, something that can never be fully attained. For better or (probably) worse, gold and mining is intrinsic to the economic and cultural identity of Australia and adopting it in my work allows me to explore contemporary China as well.
SS: What role does writing play in your practice? Can you talk a little about the relationship between the visual and the written components of your work?
EL: Writing is where all of my work starts. Titles and wordplay are really important: words frame the work that comes after and is both open and specific enough to generate the ideas and forms the project will take. I read as widely as I can when I'm researching and then write down key words or phrases that jump out, often combining them in permutations that make a new or unfamiliar thing. I find words to be incredibly visual – or maybe I whittle them down to try to find the visual in them. I'm a very slow writer – when I 'write' an article or interview, I labour over it and it's quite agonising... until it starts to take its own shape and then the logic and what it needs to be takes over. In contrast, when I write while I'm forming ideas for an artwork, the words are scribbled or typed rapid-fire, quite feverishly, seeking and forging connections that might turn into something more, something to translate into form. Writing has been there since I was a kid and had a fanzine with my best friend where we interviewed our favourite bands, through to editing my high school magazine and then my current work with Assemble Papers. It's the way I start to synthesise ideas – how I make sense of my position, experience and perspective in relation to the status quo, or a politician's, or another artist or social movement – and then this written synthesis carries through into how I try to distill or synthesise the personal with the geopolitical or the national in my artwork. I actually was on the road to being a poet (!) and did some probably terrible spoken word at sticky carpet pubs at uni; thankfully this performative tendency has manifested in a slightly different way for me.
SS: A poet! Who are your favourite poets? Do they inspire your art practice?
EL: Oh, it's delving through the mists of time to think about poets as I don't read much poetry anymore. But The Pillowbook by Sei Shōnagon (an 11th century Japanese courtesan) is an all-time favourite; Anne Carson and Raymond Carver are two more who distill whole worlds and relationships into the most concise words. The people who inspire my art practice now are artists: Tehching Hsieh, Mierle Laderman Ukeles, Justin Shoulder and Agnès Varda among many others.
SS: What appealed to you about the Gertrude Studio Program?
EL: I've been visiting Gertrude since I started going to galleries in high school; I guess I've always looked to it as a barometer and incubator of contemporary art practice in Melbourne and Australia through its studio program. I've had many friends go through and can see the impact it's had on their practice and careers. I'm at a point where I'm working on an ambitious scale and continuing to push what I do into untested territory, so to do this with the support of the other artists and staff and audiences through the Studio Program is opportune timing. Thanks for having me.
