LIM SIANG JIN, 73, is a Malaysian self-taught artist working across painting, drawing, photography and digital-analogue experimentation. He began making art in the 1970s alongside a career in journalism, publishing and communications. He co-founded The Edge, Malaysia’s most influential business weekly, and later led a team that transformed theSun into Malaysia’s national free newspaper. After a three-decade hiatus, he returned to art during the COVID pandemic in 2020.

Lim’s practice reflects a lifelong conversation between sociology, journalism, publishing, communications and art. His 2026 solo exhibition, Evolution, brought these strands together, exploring how experiences, ideas and influences accumulated over five decades shape creative expression. Working across acrylic painting, minimalist drawing, postcard-sized imagery and installation, he explores ideas of freedom and constraint, perception, memory, symbolism and change. His approach is exploratory rather than stylistically fixed, drawing freely from different media and from the visual languages of artists he has studied over the years.

He held his first solo exhibition, Restart 2020: Continuation & Change, in Kuala Lumpur in 2022. This was followed by Our Legacy: Landmark Memories of Penang Free School (2023), Lanna: Symbols in Focus (2025), 73 to 83: Autobiography in Fragments (2025), and Evolution (2026). His work has also appeared in numerous group exhibitions in Malaysia and internationally.