NEW TAIPEI CITY.- The development of Taiwanese art in the early twentieth century was shaped by shifts in the global political landscape and grew increasingly diverse through movements across geographic, cultural, and historical boundaries. Lim Kac-keong (1901–1992) was born into the Lin Ben Yuan family of Banqiao, Taiwan. In his youth, he lived at Shuzhuang Garden on the southeastern tip of Kulangsu Island in Xiamen. He later traveled to Britain, France, and Switzerland, undertaking twelve years of formal academic training in art. From 1938 to 1949, amid the upheavals of the period, he and his family moved repeatedly between Xiamen, Hong Kong, and Australia. In the mid-1950s, he settled in Taiwan, where he devoted nearly two decades to art education and social engagement. Lim's artistic trajectory, spanning much of the twentieth century, reflects the historical transformations of modern East Asia and offers an important point of reference for understanding this chapter in art history.
Lim's art is not merely a record of his experiences of migration; it is also an ongoing creative inquiry into the nature of “seeing.” His early realist works were deeply informed by British watercolor and European academic training; in the postwar period, he experimented extensively with figural subjects, landscape, the nude, and abstract form. His later practice brought together reflections on the cosmos, Eastern thought, and insights drawn from life. Throughout, Lim observed the world with a keen and lucid gaze, continually seeking new possibilities for artistic expression through light, color, space, and form. Figuration and abstraction, the rational and the poetic, observation of nature and spiritual contemplation converged in his work, giving rise to an artistic language that combined an international outlook with a personal philosophy. Passionate about art throughout his life, Lim used his practice to respond to his times and to the life around him, while maintaining a serene and lucid outlook on life.
Yet despite the richness and diversity of his artistic practice, Lim's place in Taiwanese art history has yet to receive comprehensive study and reassessment. Bringing together more than ninety years of biographical records and a systematic survey of the subjects and pictorial styles of over one hundred works, the exhibition adopts a curatorial approach that interweaves chronological and thematic perspectives. In doing so, it seeks to clarify the trajectory of Lim's practice across the geographic, cultural, and historical contexts of Europe and Asia and through periods of dramatic political upheaval. At its heart is the artistic question that occupied Lim throughout his life: how can “seeing” become a way of responding to life, and “art” a way of understanding the world? Bringing his works and archival materials into renewed dialogue, the exhibition reconsiders the historical significance and place of Lim within modern Taiwanese art history. It invites visitors to follow his gaze, contemplate the cosmos alongside him, and consider the enduring relationships between art, life, and the world.
With works by: LIM Kac-keong
“Seeing” is the first lesson in painting.
There is no great mystery to painting; what matters most is to “see.”
Simply paint what you see, what you truly see with the mind's eye. —Lim Kac-keong
