Kates-Ferri Projects is proud to present Solitude is Not a Waiting Room, the first New York solo exhibition by Malaysian artist Justin Lim, between September 4 – October 4, 2025. Featuring his most recent paintings, half of which were created during his May 2025 residency with the gallery’s B-Side Artist-in Residency Program, the show offers a quietly lush meditation on domestic interiors and the unspoken psychological textures of contemporary life.

Lim’s visual language bridges Southeast Asian material culture with the still-life tradition of European painting, building interior scenes that feel at once tenderly specific and universally resonant. Across his works, chairs sit unoccupied, light pours in through open doors and windows onto objects—cushions, plants, furnishings, decorations—that gather together in suspended arrangements. The spaces, though seemingly devoid of human presence, are deeply inhabited. Lim reflects that, “In some ways, these are all self-portraits, but I also wanted to imagine what kind of person would inhabit these spaces.”

A central work in the exhibition, At Home in Solitude (2025), completed during the residency, exemplifies Lim’s ability to subtly embed biography and regional specificity. A cushion bears a modified batik pattern recognizable across both Malaysian and Singaporean cultures, while a painting-within-the-painting—one of Lim’s own—is placed on walls, creating a recursive gesture: a painting inside a painting, a home inside an imagined memory. These layered references, along with repeated motifs like patterned bowls found in Asia and the US, give Lim’s compositions a nested quality, like memories folded into one another.

Lim’s painterly sensitivity draws inspiration from figures such as Georgette Chen, the pioneering Singaporean artist known for her modernist still lifes, and Australian printmaker Cressida Campbell, whose richly detailed domestic scenes also blur the line between observation and interior reflection. But Lim’s spaces resist categorization. They are not merely “Asian interiors” nor nostalgic postcards of Southeast Asia. Instead, they operate as subtle subversions. “I’m making paintings that depict Asian aesthetics in a Western mode.” The lushness and quiet wealth in these suburban Kuala Lumpur scenes challenge the reductive Western perception of Southeast Asia as inherently impoverished.

Lim’s practice emerged with new clarity during the pandemic, when lockdowns led him to turn inward and spend 12-hour days in his studio, building what he calls “fantasy spaces I would like to be in.” The slow pace of acrylic on canvas draws from personal memory and reaches for something universal. The exhibition title echoes this ethos. Like a visual diary of quiet psychological states, Solitude is Not a Waiting Room invites viewers to consider what it means to be alone—not as absence, but as presence. As Lim quotes André Malraux, “I keep inside my private museum everything I have seen and loved.” These paintings, too, become private museums—of feeling, memory, and gentle assertion.

Bio: Justin Lim (b.1983, Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia) completed his postgraduate studies in 2006 with the Master of Art (Fine Art) programme by The Open University UK conducted at Lasalle College of the Arts, Singapore after obtaining a BA(Hons) Fine Art majoring in painting. He has exhibited widely in Southeast Asia in various solo & group exhibitions and was the recipient of the 2008 Malaysia-Australia Visual Artist Residency at Rimbun Dahan, Malaysia. He has since held residencies at the Vermont Studio Center, USA (2011 – Asian Artist Fellowship/ Freeman Fellowship), Red Gate Gallery, Beijing (2013 – Khazanah Nasional Artist Residency), The Tasmanian College of the Arts, University of Tasmania, Australia (2016 – International Artist in residence), Kates-Ferri Projects, New York City (2025 Artist-in-residence)

Selected group exhibitions include the Asian Art Biennale: Viewpoints & Viewing points, Taiwan Museum of Fine Arts (2009), Modern Love, Earl Lu Gallery / Institute of Contemporary Art, Singapore (2015), Asia Young 36 / Asia Contemporary, a survey of contemporary Asian art practices, Jeonbuk Museum of Art, Jeonju, South Korea (2016) and Contemporary Chaos, curated by Demetrio Paparoni, Vestfossen Kunstlaboratorium, Norway (2018), Art Basel Hong Kong (2023/2024/2025), The Armory Show, NYC (2024), Untitled Art, Miami Beach (2023/2024)

Artist Statement: Lim’s paintings depict his personal observations of private living spaces. Post covid-19, his works portray an emotional state of melancholic or nostalgic longing for a beloved yet absent something or someone. Drawing from familiar objects and surroundings from his hometown of Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia, they are a recollection of feelings, experiences and places that are often illusive and ambiguous.

He currently lives and works in Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia.

Available Art Work from Exhibition 

Video of exhibition on YouTube