Hannah Lim’s work responds to her cultural identity and experience. As a person of mixed Singaporean and British heritage both her research and practice has come to engage with the colonial connotations of the relationship between the East and the West. These connotations are most evident in themes such as Orientalism and its relationship to Chinoiserie; an 18th-century aesthetic trend in which elements of Chinese design were recreated in relation to European aesthetics and tastes. Lim attempts to re-imagine and reclaim ideas and designs associated with the Chinoiserie, which have in the past had problematic colonial undertones. Cultural designs are shared as opposed to appropriated, it is no longer about one culture being moulded to the demands of another.
