Lim Kim Hai, Solo, 69 Fine Art Gallery

As we jovially walked down that antediluvian equatorial brick staircase, moss and tree ferns grew silently in the romantically dim gardens of 69 Fine Art Gallery. Anticipating the exhibition, I recalled the hazy, golden, apple orchards of my youth. At age 10, I had run free through hundreds of acres of apple trees whose names, except a few, have returned to the teacher. 

I slowly grew amidst Cox’s Orange Pippin, Discovery, D’Arcy Spice and so many more varieties of Eve’s fruit. Apples framed my pubescent years. Rotting, cider bound fruits scented my growth, just as they had scented the insides of Tolkien’s Hobbit barrels. Apple blossom graced my summers. I was too young for Rosie and cider. I was just some Arthur Ransome character wannabe, all apple bound and confined by creeping Englishness. 

In my latter years apples became designed by The Fool (Dutch artists Simon (Seemon) Posthuma and Marijke Koger), for The Beatles, and by Rog Janoff - as a logo for that infamous computer company.

Back in the tropical warmth of Malaysia, and exiting those exquisitely rambling nightly gardens, inside 69 Fine Art Gallery we were welcomed by bright lights and cool air conditioning. Having been washed by gallery currents, I nearly passed out (Tomber dans les pommes) as we were welcomed by a triumvirate of charming French expatriates. Firstly, a most seductively inviting Frenchman who could put Charles Aznavour to shame, smiled as wide as any Cheshire cat, and was accompanied by two even more enchanting and alluring French women - my mind swept to Catherine Deneuve and Jeanne Moreau, me being of that age. The evening had begun very well.

We were there, at the opening of an exhibition by Chinese Malaysian artist Lim Kim Hai, aka the Apple Man for reasons which shall become obvious. I had been introduced to his work some time previously, in some small selling gallery in the wilds of Kuala Lumpur. I had been curious as to why a Malaysia artist had taken apples as his subject. The answer was in this exhibition.

Lim Kim Hai initially had studied in Singapore’s Nanyang Academy of Fine Arts, before heading off to France’s ecole Nationale Superieure Des Beaux Arts, in Paris. There was a moment of ‘eureka’ as I realised that France, an apple producing country, has nurtured artists with a great love of painting apples (pommes). Two exceptional French artists - Chardin and Cezanne had both delighted in still life paintings of apples. You might recall Dish of Apples by Paul Cézanne (Aix-en-Provence)1876–77, Still Life with Jar, Cup, and Apples (Aix-en-Provence) 1877 or Still Life with Apples and a Pot of Primroses (Aix-en-Provence)1891–92. Likewise Chardin’s series of Apples (and Oranges), combining modernity and sumptuous beauty in one of the most important still lifes produced by the artist in the late 1890's. Even neighbouring Belgian Surrealist painter René Magritte, in Son of Man (1964), had a shot at painting that pomaceous fruit.

As we sauntered the gallery, walls of apples tumbling, falling, rising, sitting as subjects made me think of Bilbo, The Hobbit and Lake-Town, though not necessarily in such a negative sense as Fili (from the book, not the film).

Though Malaysia had never been known for growing apples, it being too moist and far too hot, the Sarawakians in Ba’kelalan have laboured long and hard to, at last, bring Eve’s fruit to Malaysia. So maybe it is timely that a French art gallery founder (Patrice Vallette), in Kuala Lumpur, should also present apples to the equatorial public. Perhaps, then, it is timely to bring a Malaysian artist, who has reveled in painting apples as his subject during his lengthy sojourn in France, to a Malaysian audience becoming increasingly familiar with the fruit.