Hannah Lim : Fire | Orchid ( Solo Exhibition)

Wilder Gallery is pleased to present Fire | Orchid, a solo exhibition by Hannah Lim, marking the artist’s second presentation with the gallery. Bringing together new paintings and Lim’s distinctive Snuff Bottle series, the exhibition expands upon her ongoing exploration of cultural inheritance, ornament, and the symbolic language of objects.

The works in Fire | Orchid draw particular inspiration from Lim’s recent journey to Singapore and Malaysia, where she reconnected with extended family and revisited the visual environments that continue to shape her practice. Working from her mixed Singaporean and British heritage, Lim reflects on how architectural detail, decorative traditions, and material culture become carriers of memory — quietly embedding themselves within contemporary forms.

Throughout the exhibition, references to Peranakan architecture, Nonyaware decorative traditions, and the ceremonial presence of footed temple urns emerge through colour, pattern, and structure. These influences are most visible within Lim’s Snuff Bottle works, where intricate surfaces and luminous palettes echo the layered histories of Southeast Asian design while remaining firmly rooted in the artist’s imaginative visual language.

At the centre of the exhibition is the orchid, a recurring motif that lends the exhibition its title. Each Snuff Bottle features an imagined orchid inspired by those encountered in Singapore’s botanical gardens. For Lim, the orchid functions both as a personal emblem of heritage and as a symbol rich with shifting meanings — resilience, hybridity, fragility, and transformation. Rather than botanical representation, these forms operate as speculative symbols, bridging lived experience and cultural mythology.

Alongside the paintings and vessels, Fire | Orchid introduces a new two-tier sculptural shelf created in collaboration with artist Hugo Harris. Drawing on Chinese fretwork alongside European Art Nouveau furniture traditions, the work reflects Lim’s ongoing interest in points of cultural intersection — moments where aesthetic languages meet, merge, and evolve through exchange. Displayed as both functional structure and sculptural object, the shelf extends the exhibition’s dialogue between artwork, architecture, and domestic space.

Across painting, sculpture, and object-making, Lim approaches ornament not as decoration but as a form of storytelling. Her works trace the movement of motifs across geography and time, revealing how identity can be constructed through accumulation, adaptation, and reinterpretation. In Fire | Orchid, personal history and collective visual memory intertwine, offering a contemplative meditation on heritage as something living, fluid, and continually remade.