Won Ju Lim has built a career as an artist in record time. Originally an architecture student, she started making art 12 years ago at age 26. Since then she has had 13 solo exhibits in Spain, England, Switzerland, Germany, Canada, California and Hawai'i. She's participating in the first Canary Islands Art & Architecture Biennial, which opens Nov. 27.

The Honolulu Academy of Arts commissioned the South Korea-born, Los Angeles-raised Lim to make "In Many Things to Come." The work is the third in the academy's contemporary masters series.

The piece, constructed in Lim's Los Angeles studio, is made of Plexiglas, wood, foam-core board, aluminum foil, tape, papier-mache, paper and colored glue sticks. Houses and grasses from toy-train sets are arranged in groupings of mountains and architectural-like forms. Scenes shot on O'ahu are synchronized and projected from three video projectors on a 15-minute loop.

Viewers become part of the work as their shadows mingle with the projected images — constantly changing from clouds, trees, sunsets and underwater scenes to industrial scenes and cityscapes.

The piece is in some ways a collage of literary themes taken from the writings of Marcel Proust, Italo Calvino and Susan Stewart. Proust's concept of involuntary memory, wherein sensual stimulus can spark recollections without conscious effort, also suggests that these memories eradicate the passage of time between the original event and its re-experience.

Whether we are our memories or not, Lim focuses on what and how we recall.

Lim was in town for the opening of her show and talked about her work at the academy.

Q. What inspired you to get into installation art?

A. My attraction toward it is very romantic. It's the idea of past, memory and longing as it relates spatially, to cities. It's a combination of a temporal way of approaching this type of thing and a spatial way.

In terms of my life, I am always traveling and am 12 hours behind or seven hours ahead. I don't have a physical relationship with buildings. I drive by them at 70 mph. That's my relationship to cityscapes and landscapes.

My influences come from popular culture, film and walking through shopping malls — like Ala Moana. If you look at (a mall) ... as a piece of sculpture and you look at how people navigate through this sculpture it is really a brilliant object. Las Vegas is amazing. I work with lots of big installations, but I also do flat works, smaller objects, single-channel projections, monitor pieces, photography — I mix it all up.

Q. What inspired you to do this piece for the academy?

A. I was in a gift shop at the airport, and I thought about the idea of the souvenir. The objects lie. I have this beautiful experience on O'ahu. I go back home and I take an object, a souvenir, and that's supposed to be a symbol of my week here, and it's just not right. It's supposed to represent that time or your memory. So what happens is the memory is really porous, it's fluid, it doesn't have borders. Everything gets compressed and erased so therefore this object has to lie for me and represent all that. I'm not against that necessarily, I just think it is a really lazy version as well as a very commercial marketing strategy in many ways.

I thought of doing projections that never stay still, and lots of superimpositions, and really long, long dissolves where an image is sometimes recognizable or not. None of these images ever stays still — they are always interrupted by another image, seven other images or by a piece of sculpture.

It's the same with the sculptural aspects of the installation. I just wanted to make this landscape my memory of the city. In terms of these landscape and architectural elements, you can't point to it and say, I know exactly what it is. It's about the slipperiness of memory — it's never fixed.

Q. Why did you switch from architecture to installation art?

A. I started making art when I was 26 — later than most people. I studied architecture and design as an undergrad. Then I took four years off to do architectural stuff ... drafting and rendering. I thought I wanted to be a really big architect. At a certain point, I thought that all the things I wanted to do as an architect maybe I could do in sculpture or installation or in art in general. In some ways it's a continuation of what I wanted to do with buildings and architecture.

Q. Did you shoot the video for the projections in the exhibit?

A. No, I work with a filmmaker. I have a lot of people who work with me — the editor, videographer and two or three assistants are in my studio.

What is so interesting about O'ahu is that the landscape is always changing because of the wind, and the clouds rolling in and out. If I didn't capture it in 10 seconds, I might never get it again.

Q. Is there a political slant to "In Many Things to Come"?

A. I did not approach it in a political sense. That is something that could be questioned with my work. If there is a political slant it is not direct. I don't know Honolulu. I am a visitor, a tourist in many ways. I don't have an attachment or an investment. I can look at it with blurry romantic eyes so it can give me the most romantic view of the city.

Q. Why did you use the materials you did?

A. I thought I should use materials that relate to time and memory. So, for example the aluminum foil records activity, compared to expressionist painting that records the gestures of the artist. Aluminum foil records all the crumpling and creases that mean there was a lot of activity in that part of the sculpture. Other parts are smoother and are recorded in a different way. It's the same thing with the tape. The faster you peel it off, the curlier it gets, so that records another kind of activity that has to do with material. ... I absolutely had fun with this piece.

Q. Who, besides museums, buys large installation artwork?

A. There are a lot of private collectors who have their own foundations that buy bigger work. There are also really interesting collectors out there who like to mix it up and are making it possible to show really big work. They don't just buy paintings. They want video, they want film and they want really big sculptures and installations. That is what makes their collection really interesting. I just installed a piece for a collector in Hamburg (Germany) where the space in which he shows his collection is bigger then most museums. It's his private foundation.

Q. What do you hope people will take away from this exhibit?

A. An experience in which they get lost in orange Plexi. I think that is an amazing experience and I think not everybody has experienced that. Do you know what I'm saying?

I think it is a huge statement in some ways to say "get lost in my orange" without having to say this is what my work is about or this is what I want the viewers to understand or get out of my work. I think it could be just as intense if, for a few seconds, they are blinded by the light and they turn around and all these shadows and lights are starting to happen. I think that that could be something.