Zelam Lim: West Bund Art Fair

Chinese artist Zelam Lim (林子楠) presents Sunyata Studio Project at West Bund Art & Design 2025, a new, large-scale installation conceived as a visual meditation on nature, energy, and transformation.

Trained from an early age in traditional Chinese painting, Zelam Lim discovered graffiti and urban art in the early 2000s. This dual foundation, balancing academic precision and expressive freedom, lies at the heart of his practice. Over the past two decades, he has developed a distinctive pictorial language that merges ink techniques, acrylics, and aerosol paint, bridging tradition and modernity, contemplation and movement.

Drawing inspiration from the Buddhist concept of Sunyata, which he interprets not as emptiness but as a space of balance and creative potential, Zelam Lim’s paintings evoke an organic harmony between light, color, and form. His landscapes are not depictions of nature but inner spaces — places where thought and emotion flow together, where the visible meets the invisible.

For West Bund 2025, the artist unveils a monumental work depicting white tigers moving through an ethereal green landscape, embodying both strength and serenity. Deeply rooted in Asian symbolism, these figures reflect the duality central to his work: energy and stillness, presence and transformation. Executed in aerosol paint on linen, the piece reveals a refined mastery of gesture, at once precise, fluid, and meditative.

With Sunyata Studio Project, Zelam Lim emerges as one of the most promising voices of China’s contemporary art scene, bridging spiritual heritage and modern expression through a body of work that feels both poetic and deeply attuned to the present.