Hannah Lim is a London-based sculptor whose practice sits at the crossroads of British and Singaporean heritage, working through the visual language of Chinoiserie — the 18th-century European trend of imitating Chinese design — to question who gets to shape cultural imagery and how. Her interest connects directly to her mixed British and Singaporean background, and she treats the reimagining of historical appropriation as a matter of respecting the heritage of the designs she references rather than simply borrowing from them. This line of inquiry deepened while she studied at Edinburgh College of Art, where being one of the few students of colour pushed her to make work rooted in her own heritage, a sharp departure from the multicultural environment of southwest London where she grew up.
Materially, Lim’s sculptures pair historical motifs with distinctly contemporary substances. She combines Jesmonite, brightly coloured polymer clay, laser-cut metal and coloured plastic chains, folding ornamental and functional design together, especially in her larger sculptural furniture pieces. Recurring cultural motifs — orchids, Singapore’s national flower, alongside herons, dragons and snakes — recur across scales, from room-filling furniture-like forms down to snuff bottles built with painstaking detail in polymer clay. Both registers of her work carry anthropomorphic or creature-like traits: clawed feet, bowed legs, wings and curved arms give these objects a sense of animation, turning static forms into playful, almost living structures. Her research process is hands-on and image-driven — she often starts by paging through furniture design books and building mood folders on Instagram spanning sculpture, photography, set design, garments and graphic design — grounded as well in critical theory, drawing on Edward Said’s writing on the East being exoticized by the West, and Anne Anlin Cheng’s concept of Ornamentalism, which examines how ornamental objects have historically stood in for and defined East and South East Asian womanhood.
The snuff bottle series distills this research into intensely personal objects. Prompted by museum displays of historical snuff bottles and questions about their origins and former owners, Lim builds her own versions by hand, stamping them with her personal chop, replicating her grandmother’s jade pendants in clay, and topping them with orchids — compressing fragments of her own identity into small, colourful, playful forms. She favors polymer clay for its capacity to hold fine detail at a small scale, describing the process itself as therapeutic rather than tedious, while intricacy carries through to her larger works via handmade chains, ornate shelving and brackets that double as structural and decorative elements. Across both scales, the work operates as social commentary as much as craft — a quiet rebuttal to design history’s habit of extracting from a culture without accountability to it, replacing extraction with authorship.
More info: Website, Instagram.
