Imprints of a Vanished Time: Paintings and Prints by Lim Mu Hue

artcommune proudly presents Imprints of a Vanished Time: Paintings and Prints by Lim Mu Hue, an exhibition that spotlights the late Singapore artist’s dynamic exploration across oil, ink, woodcut and mixed media works. Featuring 19 works dating to the period of 1950s to 2002, the show traces Lim’s thoughtful synthesis of Western academic techniques and deep sensitivity to local themes and identity. Lim Mu Hue (1936–2008, Singapore) was a second-generation Singapore artist best known for his oil works and woodblock prints executed in a realist and often narrative-driven style. Born in 1936 to a Teochew family of Chinese descent, Lim grew up in a period of social change and nation-building in early Singapore. His art would later reflect these historical shifts through intimate, detailed portrayals of ordinary people, local landscapes and vanishing trades.

Lim received his formal training at the Nanyang Academy of Fine Arts (NAFA), graduating in 1955 with a Diploma in Western Painting. There, he studied under key figures of the Nanyang art style and was exposed to both Chinese and Western art mediums. Much of Lim’s output in the 1950s was focussed on Western oil, charcoal, watercolour, and pastel works, with many revealing of his spirited experimentation across the academic genres of landscape, still life and portrait.

Manager of a Rubber Plantation Estate, for instance, portrays a figure that comes across as quietly dignified and almost austere in presence. Lim highlights particular physical traits of the figure, such as histanned skin, rugged arms, and lean yet muscular frame to convey a daily life characterised by outdoor exposure and active labour. The steely greens of the background and opaque blacks of the pants are deployed in high contrast against the warm ochres of the skin and variated shades of whites used to illustrate the shirt and the hat. Lim combines clarity with tenderness in his treatment of the form to carve out a chiaroscuro-like focus, giving the portrait a monumental and industrial character.