The loneliness of contemporary being. HH LIM's exhibition-manifesto in Milan.

Cramum and Gaggenau bring Sino-Malaysian artist HH Lim back to Milan, after four Venice Biennials and seven years away from the Lombard capital, with the exhibition NO, NO? NO. NO! curated by Sabino Maria Frassà. Set up at the Gaggenau DesignElementi Hub in Milan, the exhibition will open April 17 during DesignWeek and will be open to the public until Oct. 13, 2023.

HH LIM, known for his tongue nailed to the table and the letters engraved in his works, proposes on this occasion an exhibition-manifesto that aims to investigate the loneliness of contemporary being and the difficulty of communicating. “Communication is basically the most ruthless form of consumerism. Every moment in the world billions of words are uttered, written and sung. But what remains? What do we really say to each other? Nothing,” the artist explained.

Curator Sabino Frassà, in elaborating on the artist’s vision, explained, “HH LIM proposes a ’fasting of the word’: To a ’shouted’ world he responds with a silence that fills the space. Thus there is no correct reading of ’HH Lim’s word.’ There is an invitation to empathy, to put oneself in the other’s shoes, to accept that what each of us can offer is only a ’point of view’ as one of his famous sitting-sculptures celebrates.” “Illegible and almost only a sign without content, it becomes a universal body, a form of collective thought-the sum of us all-to strive for.”

Ambiguity, contradiction, playfulness and irony are the tools used by the artist to put the audience in a position to identify a point of rupture, to develop critical thinking. For this reason, H.H. Lim proposes an art far from aesthetic pleasure, intended to be food for thought, declined from time to time through different mediums: from performance to painting, passing through sculpture and installations.

Black color plays the leading role in marking the black hole of communication-solitude in which we find ourselves. The large canvases in the exhibition, like the aluminum gold and bronze sculptures, reflect on the meaning of the era in which we live, a historical moment in which: “[...] the word of social media has become the perfect art for a brutal and ruthless propaganda whose only possible outcome is a profound disregard for the other from oneself and for life,” says the artist, who believes instead in “the good word: kindness, the narrator of a harmony that is never taken for granted or trivial, almost like a dance ... that allows one to brush against the other without ever touching him.” This is how H.H. Lim chooses to reset everything and begin again. Beginning again from a simple chair, on which he asks the visitor to sit to put himself in the other’s shoes, to share the “point of view,” also engraved and titled in the work itself.

Visits by appointment infocramum@gmail.com

Hours: Monday through Friday from 10 a.m. to 6:30 p.m.

Image: ©Francesca Piovesan - Courtesy of H.H. Lim, Gaggenau and Cramum.

The loneliness of contemporary being. HH LIM's exhibition-manifesto in Milan.

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