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.”

From the late 1960s onward, Lim’s practice grew increasingly conceptual, shifting away from integral carved forms toward sequences of modular units in which the space between elements carried as much sculptural weight as the forms themselves. Across both sculpture and printmaking, she developed a sustained exploration of rhythm, sequence, and spatial progression. Her Ladder prints from the early 1970s extended her investigation into geometric repetition and incremental change, finding sculptural counterparts in her 1973 Intervals works, painted wooden structures composed of ascending, rhythmic units. The early 70s marks Lim’s evolution toward the formal and material language of Minimalism.