Dain Lim at OBJECTHOOD: Observing the Familiar Until It Becomes Strange

There are artists who invent new worlds. And there are artists who make you see the one you already live in differently. Dain Lim belongs to the second kind.

Her recent exhibition at OBJECTHOOD, Busan, brought together a body of work that asks a deceptively simple question: what happens when you look at something ordinary long enough that it starts to feel strange?

Lim’s practice is rooted in sustained observation. Not the quick glance we give to the things around us every day, but the kind of looking that eventually breaks the familiar open. Windows, thresholds, the space between inside and outside. These are her subjects, and she returns to them with the patience of someone who knows that the longer you look, the more a thing reveals.

Her window series sits at the center of this inquiry. Each painting captures a threshold, the precise point where inside becomes outside, where light shifts, where perception quietly reorganizes itself. The works don’t dramatize this moment. They hold it still, long enough for the viewer to feel it.

‘Whispering Slit’ (2025) marks a shift in her approach. Where earlier works accumulated a kind of stillness, this piece moves toward something more fluid. There is rhythm here, a sense of change that hasn’t settled yet. Lim seems less interested in capturing a moment than in tracing the motion between moments.

‘The In-Between’ is perhaps the clearest expression of what Lim is after. It is the space where her gaze ends and the viewer’s begins, where looking stops being passive and starts to feel like participation. You don’t just see the painting. At some point, it sees back.

Dain Lim’s work is available to explore on Artue, an AI art advisor that helps you understand not just what a work looks like, but what it means, who made it, and why it matters.

Explore Dain Lim on Artue 🔗 artue.io

https://artue.io/artist/dain-lim