Solo Exhibitions (Brief)

Nosik Lim was represented by solo exhibitions including 《Seonsan: My Familys Ancestral Mountain》 (Space Willing N Dealing, Seoul, 2025), 《Where Shadow Linger》 (Space Æfter, Seoul, 2024), 《Deep Line》 (Kumho Museum of Art, Seoul, 2023), 《Unfolded》 (Project Space Sarubia, Seoul, 2023), 《Pebble Skipping》 (Artspace Boan 2, Seoul, 2020), and 《Folded Time》 (Hapjungjigu, Seoul, 2017).

Group Exhibitions (Brief)

Lim has also participated in numerous group exhibitions held at Arario Gallery Shanghai (Shangai, China, 2025), Arario Gallery Seoul (Seoul, 2024), SONGEUN (Seoul, 2023), Ilmin Museum of Art (Seoul, 2023), Art Center White Block (Paju, Korea, 2022), SFAC Seoul Art Space Geumcheon (Seoul, 2021), Amado Art Space (Seoul, 2020), and more

Awards (Selected)

He gained attention for being selected in the Kumho Museum of Art and Kumho Young Artist 2022.

Residencies (Selected)

He was the artist-in-residence at the SeMA Nanji Residency in 2019, Incheon Art Platform in 2020, and the SFAC Seoul Art Space Geumcheon in 2021.

Collections (Selected)

His works are collected by institutions such as the Seoul Museum of Art, Gyeonggi Museum of Modern Art, National Museum of Modern and Contemporary Art’s Art Bank, Ilmin Museum of Art, ARARIO MUSEUM and more.

Originality & Identity

Nosik Lim’s work begins by transforming psychological experiences tied to his geographical background and familiar spaces into painting. In works such as Milking room 3(2016), presented in the solo exhibition 《View from the Inside》(OCI Museum of Art, 2016), Lim depicts the ranch where he spent his childhood not as a mere landscape, but as a metaphor for an externally controlled social system. The ranch fence becomes a site where inside and outside, reality and ideals collide—visually materializing personal memories embedded in place.

In his solo exhibition 《Folded Time》(Hapjungjigu, 2017), Lim focuses on the urban landscape of daily life, exploring perceptual gaps dulled by repetitive routes and fixed time cycles. In Sky Tower(2017), he collects and accumulates afterimages of the night sky he encounters every day, building painted landscapes that reveal fractures in normalized perception shaped by space and time.

In 《Pebble Skipping》(Artspace Boan 2, 2020), Lim questions the fundamental act of “capturing with the eyes.” He compares the inevitable losses that occur as images move between landscape, studio, and exhibition space to the skipping trajectory of a pebble across water—blurring the boundaries between what is seen, remembered, retained, and lost.

His recent solo exhibition 《SeonSan: My Family's Ancestral Mountain》(Space Willing N Dealing, 2025) reflects on personal and collective memory, tradition and modernity, nature and culture, layered over the ancestral mountain and rural environment where his family graves are located. Through this, Lim examines how identity, place, and history intersect, and how accumulated time and culture are represented within contemporary society.

Style & Contents

Nosik Lim’s work merges spatial experience with visual records, characterized by a non-narrative, non-representational pictorial approach. In 《View from the Inside》(2016), he uses acrylic and oil to flatten physical space into compressed images that evoke memory and psychological distance.

In 《Folded Time》(2017), Lim emphasizes the material strata of the canvas while visualizing the accumulation of time and space in works like Sky Tower(2017), where layered leftover canvas fragments embody repetition. The faint forms on dark surfaces delay the viewer’s perception, dissolving traditional hierarchies between figure and background.

In 《Pebble Skipping》(2020), Lim breaks away from conventional canvas installation, expanding painting to occupy physical space. In Branch 630(2020), he reconstructs fabric into curved, architectural forms that blur the boundaries between painting, space, and structure. Even walls, windows, ceilings, and entrances become part of an extended pictorial frame.

In 《SeonSan: My Family's Ancestral Mountain》(2025), Lim overlays oil pastel onto oil-painted landscapes, blurring and erasing both subject and viewer presence. Through this, he constructs amorphous, dreamlike scenes where reality, memory, and fiction intertwine, generating layered, intangible landscapes imbued with poetic atmosphere.

Topography & Continuity

Nosik Lim has consistently deconstructed and reinterpreted the concept of "landscape" through the lens of personal experience. In the late 2010s, he repeatedly positioned his body within familiar spaces, capturing invisible differences that disrupt normalized perceptions. Thus, space transforms from an objective setting into an accumulation of time, memory, and psychological presence.

Following the pandemic, Lim expanded the material boundaries of painting, integrating entire exhibition spaces as part of the work. Simultaneously, through the concept of the "lost image," he materialized perceptual gaps and fragmentation within the visual field.

In 《Unfolded》(Project Space Sarubia, 2023) and 《SeonSan: My Family's Ancestral Mountain》(2025), Lim explores the intersection of personal narratives and collective culture through ambiguous forms, layered surfaces, and residual traces of memory. By translating themes such as tradition, family, rural life, and funerary culture into dreamlike landscapes, he constructs a distinct approach to redefining place and identity in contemporary painting.

Lim occupies a unique position in the field of "formless landscapes of space and memory." Drawing from his personal geographical and cultural history, he is expected to further expand his practice with multilayered narratives and non-linear landscapes, continuing to push the boundaries of contemporary painting.