Born in Singapore in 1936, Kim Lim spent much of her childhood in the Japanese-occupied Malaysia before moving to London to pursue a career as an artist. She enrolled at Saint Martin’s School of Art and studied under Anthony Caro, before transferring to the Slade School of Fine Art after two years to focus on her interest in sculpture and printmaking. As a student, she was fascinated by the work of Constantin Brancusi, whose work she saw as “the kind of sculptural experience that until then [she] had only encountered in earlier periods of art.” In a similar vein, on her return trips to Singapore she would frequently stopover in Greece, Southeast Asia and Japan seeking inspiration from the vestiges of earlier civilizations and systems of thought—experiences Lim characterized as her “main art education.”