Rimin Lim

Rimin Lim is a Korean artist who has been focusing on painting realistically, and she is currently fascinated by the idea of creating immersive art with sculptural pieces made of different materials such as wood, plaster, alginate, and found objects. It is meaningful for her to deal with emotions and social/natural circumstances through art while living abroad as a foreigner and international artist in the UK. She is currently exploring the theme of mixed emotions and identity from the new experience in the changed environment. By describing the seascape and waves that contain her hometown and England, in her work, she expresses a new beginning and its optimism as beauty.

As a part of the earth, which covers more than 70% of the surface of our planet, the ocean plays a significant role in our lives. By depicting the sea that is always around us and deeply connected to our lives, she aims to cause viewers to experience different emotions, such as calm and overwhelmed. As a human being, the subject of these feelings, the fragmented body parts hanging from the ceiling try to capture the emotion of longing for home in between the ocean representing the artist’s hometown in the video and the virtual beach in reality.

She was inspired by a book called Topophilia: A Study of Environmental Perceptions, Attitudes, and Values by Yi-Fu Tuan. The term topophilia was coined by the geographer Yi-Fu Tuan and is defined as the affective bond with one’s environment – a person’s mental, emotional, and cognitive ties to a place. He indicates, in his book, that the appreciation of landscape is more personal and longer lasting when it’s mixed with the memory of human incidents. As such, Rimin Lim is trying to describe the various personal emotions that she experienced at the seaside and in England through the installation art.

The artist’s objective through this artwork is for viewers to experience different emotions and interpret them with their own experiences and perspectives about the oceans by walking around on the pebbles on the floor, sitting down on the deck chair, and looking around the installation.