Concrete Encounters 

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" Lim Jia Qi in her solo exhibition Concrete Encounters has taken up the challenge to discover a better beauty in the banal surfaces and structures of public housing flats. The standard residential accommodation of the larger part of the population of Singapore, artists have in the past struggled with the lack of character and personal identification of the repetitive block designs. Many have chosen to omit these scapes from their artworks, or to grudgingly include HDB blocks only in the periphery of landscape compositions. in 2017 Eitaro Ogawa, Tamae Iwasaki and Tomohisa Miyauchi published a tome HDB Homes of Singapore containing 1500 photographs establishing the diversity of the peoples within such housing. Marking a change to embrace the local townscapes and living environment, younger artists like Lim have begun to document public housing blocks as a personal, living and community spaces in their art. In view of this, Lim's work is sensitive to the quiet spaces and familiar repetitions of the built environment. Using print drawing and relief techniques with paper, ink and concrete media, she has begun to investigate concrete as a medium for art and for the way living spaces are structured by concrete. "

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- Seah Tzi-Yan, Programme Leader and Curator

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