Lin Tianmiao | |
---|---|
林天苗 | |
Born | 1961 Taiyuan, Shanxi Province, China |
Nationality | Chinese |
Known for | sculpture, mixed media |
Website | lintianmiao |
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]
Lin Tianmiao was born in 1961 in Taiyuan, Shanxi province, China. Her father was an ink painter and master calligrapher[2] and her mother studied and taught traditional dance.[1] She received a BFA from Capital Normal University in 1961, and later studied at the Art Students League in New York City in 1989.[3]
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]
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]
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]