This painting, illuminated with a soft cerulean blue glow, is a cross section of an unknown underwater territory where a group of jellyfish swim across its depths. The painting derives from Justin Lim’s Planet Shangri-la series, which explores the concept of Utopia as a conceptual mirror for our increasingly precarious present and the issues that plague it. The series’ reference to Shangri-La was inspired by James Hilton’s 1933 novel, The Lost Horizon, in which the author describes the fictional Shangri-La as a mystical, earthly paradise. Lim was interested in Shangri-La’s representation of a Utopia that at once acts as a place for critical reflection on contemporary concerns, and on the other hand engages with an Eastern concept of Utopia. The artist’s research into Eastern interpretations of paradise is what inspired the painting’s blue-and-white palette which alludes to the dutch-blue glaze of traditional Chinese porcelain. 

His depiction of these sea creatures charge the painting with a surreal quality, from the way the tendrils are replaced with trails of flowers to the cloud-like texture of their bodies. This dynamic, fantastical scene is dramatically animated by the artist’s meticulous depiction of texture and the falling of light and shadow across the composition, as if we are ourselves plunging into the depths of his imaginary landscape. 

For the artist, paintings from the series that propose surreal underwater landscapes, such as the present example, represent a speculative utopian habitat in which humans are absent. The artist elucidated on this concept in an interview for The Star in 2019, where he commented: “My faith in humanity is only as clear as the waters of our oceans, some parts devastatingly tainted and destroyed but other parts still untouched and should be left alone, devoid of human presence”. Understood as such, Cloud Eaters #1 offers an evocative suggestion to imagine otherwise, out of the world we live in and into the worlds we would like to cultivate.