Rock and ?
Michelle JN Lim and Tan Seow Wei
Group Exhibition
6 – 14 June 2026, 11am – 7pm
What happens when an ancient craft steps out of the margins and into the centre of contemporary artistic practice? Chinese stone seals typically occupy the margins as a stamp of authorship or official mark when an artist or calligrapher signs off on a masterpiece. Yet the seals themselves possess a layered complexity and capacity for poeticism that deserves further attention.
Bringing together the work of two artists Michelle JN Lim and Tan Seow Wei, "Rock and ?" seeks to foreground the seal. Lim and Tan take the seal as a primary creative force in their mixed media works, incorporating seal imprints into collage, printmaking, painting and fibre arts in loose, experimental ways. In doing so, they take an art form that has historically occupied the margins of calligraphy and painting into the spotlight, and show that seal carving has potential as a living, experimental language.
About the Artist(s)
Tan Seow Wei (she/her) is an artist and art educator working across seal carving, ink painting, drawing, and printmaking, producing works that are often mixed-media in nature. As Vice-President of the Siaw-Tao Chinese Seal Carving, Calligraphy & Painting Society, she has long been concerned with the future of seal carving in Singapore, where the form risks becoming inaccessible to younger, more Anglophone generations. Textual inspiration for her work is drawn from lyrics, poetry, and stories.
Michelle JN Lim (they/she) is an artist, curator, writer, and educator who came to seal carving in 2022, drawn to how the sculptural, poetic, and imagistic converge in this miniature art form, and to its deep roots in Chinese culture. Their recent work explores the use of Simplified Chinese characters in seal carving (as opposed to the more archaic, traditional seal script) and larger scale, irregularly shaped stones.