Lin Tianmiao (Chinese:林天苗; pinyin:Lín tīan míao; born 1961) is a contemporary Chinese installation artist and textile designer. She sometimes makes use of everyday objects.[1]
She lived in Brooklyn from 1988[2] to 1994. She returned to Beijing in 1995 and converted her home into an open studio which was an important venue for Apartment Art.[1] She is married to Wang Gongxin,[1] who is a video artist, and together they have a son, Shaun.[2] She has said that life's experience is constantly changing, and the way her works are presented is also constantly changing.[4][5]
Work
Lin started her career as a textile designer and used the skills she had learned in her later work.[citation needed] She changed from textile design to art because she felt like design was limiting her creativity and suppressing her expression.[6] Lin and her husband participated in the Beijing Young Artists' Painting Society, which was contiguous with the '85 Art New Wave Movement.[6] Her work is multifaceted. She sees it as representing both tradition and newness.[6] She co-founded the Loft New Media Art Center in 2001.[1]
In the 1990s Lin created works with materials of contrasting textures,[1] often using undyed cotton thread. She has also worked in other media such as sculpture, photography, video and mixed media.[7] An early work, The Proliferation of Thread Winding (1995), included 20,000 balls of thread attached with needles to a rice paper-covered iron bed.[1][8] In 2012, she made a series of works using a wooden frame, threads and synthetic bones; Minty Blue (2012) and Duckling Yellow (2012) were two works in the series.[7]
At the 2002 Shanghai Biennale she and her husband collaborated on Here or There; she described the collaboration as "unspeakable", and resolved to "never cooperate anymore."[9] She had a 2006 residency at the Singapore Tyler Print Institute where she experimented with paper media and printmaking.[1][10] Since the mid-1990s, her works have been included in every major international museum show on Chinese contemporary art.[2]
She had her solo exhibition Gazing Back: The Art of Lin Tianmiao, 對視——林天苗藝術展 as part of the 'Shanghai Pujiang OCT Ten-Year Public Art Project · 2009'. It includes three groups of works, Badges, Advent and Gazing Back, which were all created especially for this public art project.[11]
In 2017, her show at Galerie Lelong in New York exhibited her work Protruding Patterns (2014), which encouraged visitors to walk over her work - an installation made entirely of antique carpets. The carpets were embroidered with dozens of words about women in Chinese, English, French and other tongues - a selection of approximately 2,000 phrases she had collected over a period of more than five years.[12][13]
Feminist themes
Lin's work often deals with themes traditionally applicable to women. With its focus on the manifestations of domesticity and motherhood, critics have compared her work to Western feminist art, she has rejected that characterization.[1][14]
“My art is an expression of my life, as an artist, as a Chinese, and I suppose, as a woman,” she responded to the art world’s routine characterization of her as a “Chinese woman artist.”¹ She uncouples these terms as a reminder to art critics and art historians that her work transcends such an essentializing label.[15] She views that the label feminisim restricts the interpretation of her works, and how she thinks about them.[12]
List of selected artworks and exhibitions
The Proliferation of Thread Winding, 1995, Asia Society Museum, New York, 2012
123456789Suzuki, Sarah (2010). "Lin Tianmiao". Modern Women: Women Artists at the Museum of Modern Art. New York: Museum of Modern Art. pp. 405–406. ISBN978-0-87070-771-1.
1234Pollack, Barbara (October 2012). "Wrap Artist" (PDF). ARTnews. pp. 86–93.
↑Panicelli, Ida (December 1, 2017). "Lin Tianmiao". Artforum. Retrieved March 2, 2024.
↑1. Smith, Karen (October 2012). "Woven Labors" (PDF). Art in America: 138–144. I looked in many books and catalogues about female artists to see if this was true but came to the conclusion that it was not. I had always judged life from my own experience as a person, who just happened to be a woman.
↑Wang, Peggy (2020). The Future History of Contemporary Chinese Art. University of Minnesota Press.
