Michelle Lim writes across art history, criticism, and literary prose. Her attention rests at the threshold where visibility becomes the social and the political — where what is seen and what is hidden are decided by forces that art can make legible.

She is interested in how ideas circulate in today's image economy, how endangered communities persist under pressure, and how personal narratives shape a shared cultural memory across time and space.

Michelle’s current research includes a book-length study, Contemporary Art Beyond Japan's Seto Inland Sea: Cultural Ecologies in the Anthropocene (Amsterdam University Press, forthcoming 2026), and a new curatorial research project on transregional dynamics and ecosystemic mapping across the Global South.

Her writings have appeared in Art Asia Pacific, Asian Art News, World Sculpture News, and the Quarterly Literary Review Singapore, in publications by Yale University Press, Princeton Architectural Press and Cabinet, and exhibition catalogues for the Whitney Museum of American Art, the Princeton University Art Museum and the Singapore Art Museum. She co-edited American Art in Asia: Artistic Praxis and Theoretical Divergence (Routledge, 2022) and is guest-editing a special issue for the peer-reviewed journal Southeast of Now.