Charles Lim Yi Yong’s work encompasses film, installation, sound, recorded conversations, text, drawing, and photography. Over the last thirteen years, he has developed a body of work entitled SEA STATE that explores the political, biophysical and psychic contours of the city-state of Singapore, largely through the visible and invisible lenses of the sea. SEA STATE premiered at the Singapore Pavilion at the 56th Venice Biennale in 2015, and has since been shown at the NTU Centre for Contemporary Art Singapore, where he developed the work over a nine-month residency. Lim’s multimedia project takes the sea as its focal point. Here, the sea is treated as a mapped resource, an abstract commodity, and an entity through which strategic nation-building, as well as economical and political pursuits, are built. A former Olympic sailor, Lim’s lifelong engagement with the sea reveals the invisible politics of Singapore’s relationship with the ocean as a political entity, a commodity and an imaginary boundary. The project’s early stages studied Singapore’s coastal ecology and the effects of industrial activities, while recent iterations examine Singapore’s expansion through land reclamation and the ongoing quest to make the finite, infinite.