Eugenia Lim is an Australian artist of Chinese–Singaporean descent who considers the personal within the geopolitical. Her works across video, performance and installation use the body as material to explore how stereotypes, national identities, consumption and capital flows cute, divide and bond our globalised world. Her work has been exhibited internationally at the Tate Modern, Dark MOFO, ACCA, Melbourne Festival, Next Wave, GOMA, ACMI, firstdraft, the Museum of Contemporary Art (Sydney), FACT (Liverpool), Ballarat Foto Biennale, Samstag Museum of Art 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. She is a 2018–2020 Gertrude Contemporary studio artist and in 2019, is the co-director (with Mish Grigor and Lara Thoms) of 25-year-old artistic company APHIDS. The Ambassador is a major tour of Lim’s recent work, initiated by 4A Centre for Contemporary Asian Art and Museums and Galleries of NSW, traveling to eight venues across regional Australia in 2019–2021. Lim co-directed the inaugural Channels Festival, was founding editor of Assemble Papers and co-founded temporal art collective Tape Projects. She is the co-writer and host of ABC iView’s Video Becomes Us, an artist-made series on Australian video art. Lim holds a Bachelor of Media Arts (Honours) from RMIT and a Bachelor of Creative Arts from VCA/University of Melbourne.
Eugenia Lim works across video, performance and installation to explore how national identities, migration and capital cut, divide and bond our globalised world. With a critical but humorous eye, Lim uses her body and lens to frame the tensions of an individual within society and the alienation and belonging that coexists, particularly for gendered and marginalised bodies, within contemporary life. Her experience as a second-generation Australian drives her practice, which seeks to find solidarities and porosities of experiences across class, geographies, cultures, gender and sexualities. Lim’s work is a process of questioning: the relationship between aesthetics and ethics, and the role of art in creating space and time for agency, care and reflection within urgency and crisis. Lim’s work invites the audience to consider their complicity in complex global systems, framing the absurdity, inequity—and potential for resistance—in systems of global capital, power and control.
