Lenore R.S. Lim knows something about being delicate. This is not to say that she is fragile, but this is about the materials she works with and her approach as a printmaker. Leaves, Lace, and Legacy: The Art of Lenore R.S. Lim at the National Museum of Fine Arts shows decades of her works.
Looking through her works, you might realize that her chosen images are of delicate flora and veils. Her prints have seen tremendous shifts in approaches but revolving around the diaphanous veils and, in her deft hands, tamed nature with her graceful, elegant arrangement of leaves and flowers. Yet, printmaking is never accused of being soft and fragile. In fact, in Lenore’s prints, you can see the tremendous force in her materials to leave quite a literal impression.
It may not be immediately apparent in her prints because they are luminous and vivid, but these are products of years of hard work, compromises, and recalibrating dreams. Someone could say that part of Lenore’s approach to being “delicate” is the delicate balance of being a working woman, a wife, a mother, and a practicing artist, which she handled for decades. The dedication of Lenore to her art is apparent in this retrospective, which also showcases the tremendous vitality printmaking has as an art form.
It bears mentioning that this exhibition is inside a gallery dedicated to women artists at the National Museum (which, incidentally, is dominated by men, who, I wager, did not have to worry about balancing the emotional labors—plural—women usually undergo). Furthermore, Lenore is part of this lineage of strong women printmakers in the Philippines that started to gain traction in the 1970s. Lenore’s prints are visual descendants of experimentations done by her forebears with their immediate surroundings, which at that time would have been the garden and other domestic spaces.
Lenore’s prints are not flights of fancy but are grounded in the historical positioning of women in the family, culture, and history. Her most potent works deal with the World War II Comfort Women issue. How does one represent such a harrowing, despicable attack on women? Lenore produced a print with a veil in tumult and frenzy. The veil, an ornament designated to women to symbolize purity and decency, becomes jagged and warped in Lenore’s hands, looking like the ashen remains of a gaping wound. Her Violations series demands pause from the viewers to study the abject violence over a surface.
Her print of this bedraggled veil was multiplied and then turned into an installation piece at the exhibit titled Comfort House. It is printed onto four translucent planes and assembled as a hollow container. Surrounding it is a circular moat of dirt. You look through the planes and see the phantoms of the other images on the different sides. There is nothing contained here but specters of violence.
The curation is astounding in the way this powerful piece is before beautiful prints of plants, the most prominent would be the colorful ginkgo leaves Lenore adores. The leaves are fan-like (another symbol of delicate femininity) as they are unfurled in vibrant, light colors and surround in contrast to the installation. This interaction between the ginkgo leaves and the memory of wartime rape is a dialogue between pain (Comfort House) and the healing qualities of the Gingko leaves. As such, this interaction is both an act of remembrance and a refusal to give in to affliction.
For something so delicate as a veil, Lenore’s prints ask us not to forget such blights, which is a heavy task. A horror like what the comfort women experienced must be commemorated with a monument, which we did. But apparently, that monument was too problematic that it was removed from public view. Still, such stories of remembrance are monumental in Lenore’s works. And that is no delicate matter.
Leaves, Lace and Legacy: The Art of Lenore R.S. Lim runs until March 2, 2025 at Gallery XVII on the 3rd floor of National Museum of Fine Arts. Admission to the National Museum is free.
You may reach Chong Ardivilla at kartunistatonto@gmail.com or chonggo.bsky.social
