Why Hannah Lim is in the Design 100

Hannah Lim works between London and the visual language of eighteenth-century chinoiserie, the European fantasy of an imagined East that once decorated Georgian drawing rooms in porcelain and lacquer. Trained in sculpture at the University of Edinburgh and in fine art at the Ruskin School, Oxford, she takes the vocabulary of that decorative tradition — the snuff bottle, the altarpiece, the cabinet — and rebuilds it at a scale and with an intent it never had, drawing on her own Singaporean-British heritage to examine how ornament carried the story of colonial trade.

That approach was recognised early. Lim was selected for Bloomberg New Contemporaries in 2021 and followed it with a Tate commission for Women’s History Month in 2022, a ceramic work responding to Leonora Carrington’s Eluhim in the Tate Collection. Her first museum solo exhibition opened at the Museum of East Asian Art, Bath, in 2026, treating craft and colonial history as a single subject.