Art exhibition of Lim Simti: Pastel & ceramic works｜Taichung City Seaport Art Center

This exhibition has two parts: pastel work and ceramic work.  All my pastel works are those done in the past 7 years.  I chose pastel because I have been used to “hard” material like crayon, oil pastel, and pastel.  Ever since I was 5 or 6, I used crayon to make pictures.  Only after 30 did I begin to work with oil pastel.  About 20 years ago I started to use pastel and have kept it until now.  While working with pastel, I used fingers to spread out colors.  Now I am convinced that fingers are the most useful tool for making my pastel work., especially when it comes to doing gradient colors.  In my life, I have kept a habit of doodling on small sketchbooks.  Whenever I wanted to work on a larger paper, I would pick one suitable sketch from the small sketchbooks.  This was the way all the pictures of this exhibition came from..  When I started working on a paper, I usually had no definite idea what I wanted to present, and it would remain untitled after the work was done.  However, when I tried to find a title for the works for this exhibition, I found in many cases that a number of pictures seemed to share common themes, for example, themes like dancing, flying, thinking, missing, holding hands, etc.  Thus even though there was no pre-planned themes, there seems to be something connecting what was produced and what had been existing in my inner self.  What I was aware of, after all, was I wanted to make something beautiful.  The ceramic work on my exhibition includes only plates, bowls and vases, those which are useful in our daily life.  Since my primary interest was in picture making, I started my ceramic career with an intention to make pictures on the ceramic work, and treat the surface a ceramic piece as if it were a piece of sketching paper.  My ceramic work is thus more an art of graphic art than of ceramic, and to see my ceramic work amounts to seeing my work of graphic art.