The year 2019 - Belinda Sim
This year, the artist that is featured: Belinda Sim
BELINDA SIM
Belinda Sim Pei Shan (b.1995) is a recently graduated Singapore artist with an approach to art that is both cerebral and meditative. Belinda’s practice largely deals with thoughts and memories deeply influenced by the engagement and perception of the spaces around her. Her works often break down existing spaces into fragments of forms and colours, to study and understand how these spaces influence our mind. She achieves her contemplative effect with an astute palette of water colours applied principally to paper, while not refraining from mixing media such as thread, cloth and wood. The Abacus Capital Calendar 2019 features works from Belinda’s “空間 (Kuukan)” series: Space Through the Mind, Shifting Space and In Ambient.
Belinda received her BA (Honours) in Fine Arts from LASALLE College of the Arts, Singapore, awarded by Goldsmiths, University of London, in 2018. She specialises in using mixed media and unconventional ways of drawing and painting, experimenting with how such techniques can bring drawing and printmaking together to form a unique work.
Belinda won 1st Prize in the 36th International TAKIFUJI Arts Award, Japan (2015) with her mixed medium print “[心の中] Enclosed”. She has contributed one of her clay tiles in the making of the LTA Mural Project for SG50 by Delia Prvacki, and has participated in a collaboration with Owais Husain for the “House of Cards” (2016) project. She also participated in international group exhibitions such as “MULTI: +PROJECT 2016 International Group Exhibition” at Gallery Tomo, Kyoto, Japan.
Her mixed media drawing and print works from the paper series “空間 (Kuukan)” explore formal qualities of space and intangible thoughts.
In Space Through the Mind, Belinda explore spaces accordingly to her state of mind. Through her repetitive depictions of circles, she expresses the cyclic process of the mind, and draws on the illusion of space. The use of embroidery, light colours and repetitive elements creates marks, patterns and textures which bring forward a ‘daydream world’ and a state of tranquillity.
In Shifting Space, Belinda’s works deal with the idea of looking at interior spaces. By breaking down spaces into shifting fragments, Belinda engages the viewer with familiar spaces in new perspectives. The triptychs in this series rely on the same image expressed it in different colour schemes as a way for the artist herself to reengage with the space and explore a variety of narratives.
Lastly, In Ambient reflects the experience of engaging with spaces, focuses on capturing the intangible reaction of perceiving something physical. The works depict the feeling of an ambience rather than an actual space: instead space is created by the placement of overlapping geometric forms along horizontal and vertical axes, with a preponderance of blue evoking a sense of poetry and mystery.