Sugar Body, sugar, 2019-2023
Sugar Body, sugar, 2019-2023
Sugar Body is an ongoing project in which Lim uses sugar to construct bodies, objects, and environments that can be touched, altered, and consumed. Across multiple iterations, the work approaches sugar not only as a material, but as a historical and political substance—deeply entangled with colonial plantation economies, systems of labor, and global regimes of extraction and consumption.
In this project, sugar bodies are not meant to remain intact. Viewers are explicitly invited to eat them. Through this act of ingestion, the work shifts from a visual encounter to an embodied experience, where the boundary between artwork and viewer dissolves. To consume the work is to participate in it—to take part in the transformation of the object, and to internalize the histories it carries.
By foregrounding eating as a central gesture, Sugar Body asks how everyday acts of consumption are linked to larger systems that shape bodies, environments, and social relations. What does it mean to consume something that is also a body? What histories are ingested, often unconsciously, through sugar?
As the sculptures are gradually eaten, dissolved, or transformed, the work resists permanence. Instead, it exists through processes of disappearance and redistribution, implicating viewers within the cycles of consumption that sustain and reproduce global systems. In this sense, Sugar Body operates not only as an artwork, but as a material proposition: that participation—however small—carries both complicity and the possibility of awareness.