Reeha Lim’s practice engages with the fragmented, often unstable relationships between body, space, and memory. Rooted in a diasporic upbringing between Korea and China, and shaped further by her relocation to the U.S., Lim’s work emerges from a sense of dislocation—where belonging is provisional, and perception is filtered through shifting cultural and architectural frames.

Her paintings often begin from fleeting, sensory memories: the weight of the wooden door, the temperature of the wall, the distance of the gaze. These impressions resist full articulation and reappear as fragmented forms, ambiguous gestures, or thresholds that suggest entry and obstruction at once. Lim is particularly drawn to bodily expressions that fall outside of performative clarity—.gestures of the hand or foot charged with instinct, desire, hesitation, or refusal.

Working with translucent fabrics such as silk, she navigates the tension between transparency and opacity, softness and structure. She frequently activates both sides of the surface, allowing the image to bleed through, shift, and echo itself. Rather than offering a fixed vantage point, Lim’s work invites viewers into a suspended perspective—neither above nor below, but caught within the pictorial field.

This spatial ambiguity echoes her broader inquiry into how architecture and memory co-construct one another: how built space holds, distorts, or denies the body, and how the body, in turn, carries spatial residues across time and geography. For Lim, painting is both a site of reflection and a tactile proposition—a space where intimacy, distance, and misalignment are not merely visual, but fully embodied.
 
Reeha Lim (b. 1994) is a Korean artist raised in China and currently based in the U.S. Her painting practice navigates the instability of perception, exploring the friction between spatial structures and bodily gestures, and tracing the tension between desire and architectural constraint.

Reeha’s work has been presented in solo and group exhibitions internationally, including Raster Gallery through Gallery Vacancy (Warsaw), Chilli Art Projects (London), TYA Gallery, Gallery 100_0, Gallery Euljiro OF, and Haeng-hwa-tang Art Space (Seoul). She will participate in upcoming exhibitions at James Cohan Gallery (New York) and the NADA Art Fair (New York) in 2025. She has been selected for residencies at NXTHVN (New Haven, 2024–25) and Cité Internationale des Arts (Paris, 2017), and was featured in New American Paintings (Midwest Issue, 2024). Lim earned her BFA from Hongik University in 2021 and completed her MFA at Cranbrook Academy of Art in 2024 as a Fulbright Scholar.

CV

https://reeha.art