DSL Collection

"Our body is not in space like things; it inhabits or haunts space. Fur us, the body is much more than an instrument or a means. It is our expression in the world, the visible form of our intentions."

--Maurice Merleau-Ponty

 

A picture of the body is rarely about the body. A picture of the body is a decoy, distracting our attention towards the obvious bareness of the figure instead of metaphor for which it stands. A picture of the body is always a metaphor, in fact, since it's hardly ever about bodily functions. A picture of the body is a ghost, an apparition, suggesting a human presence in the midst of a fantasy of colors and forms.

 

For Lin Tianmiao, the body is a conduit to a myriad of mental states and moods. It can evoke memories or states of amnesia. A specific place or a sense of dislocation. An identity or a metamorphosis. And even though we cannot ignore the figures in her work, which one often enlarged well beyond life-size proportions, we sense that we are encountering something acutely

ephemeral, set free from the usual constraints of being a body. The body in Lin Tianmiao's photographs and installations is timeless, without a whiff of titillating sexuality or imminent mortality. Yet, these works can also make us acutely aware of our own bodies, especially those moments when unconscious gestures may reveal more than we would voluntarily enact.

 

By using images of the body, and often her own body, in such sophisticated ways, Lin Tianmiao illuminates the subtleties of her own culture, a China where opera and calligraphy and rituals can convey emotional states with a flick of finger. But, by seeing the body (and forcing her audience to see the body) as merely a representation, a picture, an artificial creation, Lin Tianmiao taps into a lineage of western contemporary art movements, bringing a post-modern finale to a story rooted in ancient tales.

 

Focus

Though monks and esthetes have shaved their heads as acts of humility and contrition for centuries, the first artist to shave his head as an art-making was Marcel Duchamp, who left a bare spot in the shape of a five-point star on the back of his head. A photograph recorded the incident and the resulting image is both a document of a work of art and a portrait of an artist. He leaves it up to viewers to decide which, but it is impossible to look at this picture without thinking how hard it is to separate one from the other.

 

By the time Lin Tianmiao shaved her head to create her seemingly simple self-portraits in her Focus series, scores of women artists in the United States, Europe and Asia had similarly explored the use of their own bodies and the intervention of the camera to make artworks that question the traditional relationship of model, artist and audiences.

 

But, before we return to the discussion of the body, in this case, the particular reference of her own body in the series titled Focus, a question must first be considered: Is it fair to reference a European artist, albeit one who is considered the most influential artist of 20th century western art, when addressing the work of an artist born in China? Indeed, it would be far easier to merely avoid the issue and only refer to Asian traditions of performance and body art and self-decoration, traditions which also have clearly influenced this series of work. Yet, for works as complex as those of Lin Tianmiao, to limit this interpretation to only one culture would be as incorrect as imposing foot-binding on a 21st century woman in the name of cultural purity. A far more open-minded approach is required to see the significance of this series of works.

 

[And, even though this is a different discussion, I have to ask "Why can't we link a Chinese artist, a woman artist, working at the beginning of the 21st century to a master of the western canon?" Some would want to protect Lin Tianmiao from the mere idea of western influences, as if this is a criticism of her work. Yet, in my experience, when we put artists in a box and separatethem from the western canon, we are by extension precluding their admission to that canon, something that an artist of Lin Tianmiao's stature certainly doesn't deserve.]

 

Focus is a series of monumental photographs, based on standard portrait shots, head to shoulders, of the artist. They might be interpreted as mug shots, since the artist stares straight at the camera, barely revealing a single emotion. She is androgynized by her shaved head, so all considerations of sexual allure are removed. And the images are black-and-white, seemingly removed to a different time and place, before color photography was invented. But most importantly, each image is shot slightly differently, varying the focal length and thereby the sharpness of the image. The viewer feels both too close and too faraway to see this face clearly.

 

In this series, Lin Tianmiao might be referencing photographs normally taken as part of the justice system or for yearbooks or for passports. But Lin Tianmiao's images have none of those neutrality. Instead, they feel haunted and passionate and quietly disturbing. When asked for her own specific models, the artist refers to the monumental photographs of Mao, seen throughout China even to this day. And there is a bit of the terror of Tiananmen Square in the way some of the images stare down off the wall. Far more apt is her other reference, images of Buddha, that often are androgynous, both masculine and feminine, and powerful in their quietude. With the addition of blurriness, the artist also throws in a third reference to Andy Warhol's Mao, which makes of triumvirate of cultural figures Mao, Buddha and Warhol present in these apparent self-portraits.

 

But, as opposed to Cindy Sherman, who would reference these male leaders by completely embodying their identities in photographic self-portraits, Lin Tianmiao reasserts her identity by altering each image with her labor-intensive technique of stitching and weaving across their surfaces. Several times, Lin Tianmiao has taken her image, printed on monumental sheaths of cloth that hang like banners from the ceiling, and tied hundred of threads through the surface. This results in a final work in which hundreds of knots pattern her face while streams of threads, like hair, flow from the back of the image and create a mammoth braid across the gallery floor. In others, she stitched a fold down the front, like a scar on the center of her face, or tied bulging knots that look like tumors.These could befrightening images, referring to cancers and disfiguration, but instead, we are not so much concerned with the distortion of appearances, as the various emotions each portrait evokes. We are not entranced by the artist's physical beauty, as is the traditional relationship of viewers to a picture of a woman, nor spell-bound by her individuality, as is the case with a Rembrandt or Van Gogh self-portrait. Inslead, we are mesmerized by the versatility on display, and the way that these variations do not simply egotistically show off virtuosity, but send us on a journey of escalating emotional states.

 

Hand Signals

In comparison, Lin Tianmiao's pictures of hands are even more restrained, yet more expressive. In this series, she photographed hands enacting gestures from Peking Opera. Shame, innocence, anger, jealousy-here is an encyclopedia of emotions evoked by the arrangement and positioning of five fingers. These images are enlarged to the size of murals and printed, once again, in black-and-white on cloth.

 

Created almost a decade after Lin Tianmiao returned to Beijing after a six-year stay in New York, this would seem to be her most impenetrably Chinese series, since the meaning of the gestures are entirely lost on western audiences unfamiliar with Peking Opera. Indeed, only afficianadosa term that includes all levels of Chinese audiences, but only the rare opera lover outside of Chinacan understand these hand movements as they are presented: chopped off and disassociated from the rest of the figure, with no costume or plot to offer clues to their meaning. Yet, on another level, this series offers a prime example of the complex array of influences present in Lin Tianmiao's work, even as it rooted in Asian culture.

 

Hands are always associated with performance, even more so in this case, where the hands are a product of the performance. The notion of gesture has specific, yet highly divergent meanings in contemporary western and traditional Chinese painting. In the west, the gesture, as in action painting, is considered indicative of the artist's emotional state and the artwork's originality and authenticity. the artwork's originality and authenticity. The painting and the artist are one and the same, what is often known as "the artist's touch." But, throughout the 20th century, many conceptual western artists, such as Duchamp, have stood this idea on its head, no pun intended. In more recent decades, artists such as Karen Finley or Paul McCarthy have shown that if you take this idea far enough, the hand drenched in chocolate syrup or covered in mayonnaise, rather than paint, can also be infantile and obscene. In reaction to this style of "body art", which was prevalent in New York during Lin Tianmiao's stay during the late 1980s, artists and audiences have moved towards less visceral, more cerebral expressions of gesture.

 

In traditional Chinese painting, gesture is much more of a performance, quite similar to the hand movements in Chinese opera. The gesture in a brush stroke or a scroll painting is not a direct expression of the artist's individuality, but a calculated style intended to carry a specific, culturally recognized, viewpoint. In Peking Opera, both the gesture itself and the way that it is performed can indicate the character's gender, personality, moral outlook and background. The audience watches for the skill and subtlety with which the actor performs the gesture; the gesture is never a conduit to the actor's own personality or state of mind.

 

Lin Tianmiao combines both interpretations western post-modernist and traditional Chinese in this series. On the one hand, these works are pure documents, straight-forward depictions of a vocabulary used in Peking Opera. On the other, by shooting in soft-focus and printing the images on cloth (which further softens the edges), she is inserting her own touch, her own presence. The work feels highly personal, even as it is merely informative. And viewers, even those who are completely ignorant of Peking Opera, can intuit the various messages of this elaborate sign language.

 

But, this project is much more sophisticated than a mere display of signs of expression; it is a summation of trends that western critics have been investigating over the past fourdecades that is reaching its crescendo, in many ways, in today's China. Indeed, one of the most important European critics, Rolande Barthes, after his trip to China in 1974 in the heyday of Mao's Cultural Revolution, wrote his masterwork, Mythologies, on the difference between myth-making and radical political expression. In this treatise, Barthes generally sets forth a way of distinquishing between signs and their hidden meanings. He makes the case that myths naturalize and universalize human actions, in order to justify activity that would be better criticized as expedient for specific historic moment or political strategy. What could that have to do with art?

 

Well, uncannily, Lin Tianmiao, by reconciling the specifics of Peking Opera with a post-modern visual vocabulary, likewise questions notions of universality, in this case in contemporary art. By the time, Lin Tianmiao left New York to return to Beijing in 1994, she would have witnessed a sea change in the New York art world through the influx of artists from around the world. Indeed, in less than a decade of hershowing in own art works made in Beijing, Lin Tianmiao would have been in shows enacting what was termed "global feminism", including such artists as Egyptian Ghad Amir, Iranian Shirin Nishat, Chinese-American Sara Sze and others, many of whom revived the idea of gesture through the use of thread and domestic crafts, integrated with photography, video and other contemporary conceptual devices.

 

As universal as we may presume that Lin Tianmiao's Hand Signals are - and in many ways, she has embedded the implication of universality as a "slight of hand" trickthese works refute the notion that all gestures are universally understood. For western viewers, who would like to believe that "a hand is a hand is a hand", it is almost impossible to not be tricked into the feeling that we understand these images. But, the artist here is the ultimate performer, like a star of the Peking Opera, fooling us by her very subtlety.

 

Seeing Shadows

Landscape has always been fundamental toLin Tianmiao's work, ever since her collaborative project with her husband Wang Gongxin Here? Or There? created for the 2002 Shanghai Biennale. For this project, Lin Tianmiao created apparel of white thread and shrouds for models who posed as ghostly apparitions in Beijing's old hutong neighborhoods for photographs taken by Wang Gongxin. The resulting installation shimmered with emotionsloss, sorrow, regret, and love for the pastwinning acclaim as one of the strongest works in the exhibition.

 

Like her more recent works, Here? Or There? made its impact by infusing a conceptual art installation with the aura of ancient relics. It did not shy away or stand apart from emotional states, but evoked these states obliquely, much like the ghosts in the images that appeared simultaneously present and absent from present day realities. This device of using landscape to evoke two time periods, past and present, pushes viewers into a consideration the psychological implications of an impending future. And yet, it stems from an age-old practice in Chinese landscape painting where scenes almost devoid of human presence can still instill a sense of palpable feelings.

 

In Lin Tianmiao's more recent series, Seeing Shadows, the ghosts are now the landscape itself, disappearing before our eyes. Much of this work captures the present-day reality of Beijing, where neighborhoods photographed just a few months ago have already disappeared. (Indeed, the hutongs from Here? Or There? are already gone.) But instead of using a straight-forward documentary style that other Chinese photographers have embraced. Isn't Beijing surrealistic without elaboration? Lin Tianmiao embues each scene with layers upon layers of her own impressions. The photograph themselves are once again haunting through her use of soft-focus, exaggerated further by her luscious printing process, enlarged to almost life size, often a single image is intended to encircle a room, placing the viewer directly within the landscape. Instead of making the scene more real, it seems more phantasmagoric at this scale. Her final "touch" covers the surface with a wide variety of stitching techniques, using these clouds of white or black threads, instead of photographic images of ghosts.

 

If these works were merely modernized versions of traditional scroll paintings, they would still be beautiful objects, evoking a romantic past, especially for foreign audiences. But, rather than capitalize on the innate exoticism of these views, Lin Tianmiao uses her threading technique to insert a disturbing note across the surface of the canvases. At times, like when she uses black threads, the images could literally be read as the smoky pollution that fills Beijing's winter skies. Or when she ties and knots white threads to the point of being bulbous pebbles, the surface looks riddled with tumors growing out of control. There is much more than an easy nostalgia at work here, even though the images of courtyard gardens are inherently beautiful. There is the presence of an activityabject and banaldisturbing the images' serene atmosphere.

 

According to the artist, the presence of ghosts is not the same in Chinese and western imagery. In the West, there is fear and danger, characters coming back from the dead to wreak destruction on the living. In China, a ghost can be a seductress or a reminder, bringing up the past to remind the living of the power of traditions. While she insists that this series is more of the latter, there is also a touch of the former in her own touch with thread. Overall, these landscapes are reminders of a not-so-distant past that represented a way of life which may have not been improved by the present and will certainly be entirely erased by the future. But, Lin Tianmiao's specters of knots and threads are also scary, especially on close examine, unquestionably interrupting, rather than decorating her courtyard views.

 

The Body

All of the above strains of thought and artistic practices come together in Lin Tianmiao's new work, which reverts back to the body without the safety net of the photographic image. In this series, the artist's use of stitching and adding to the surface of her canvas-works takes over in ways that are decidedly not decorative. These are her boldest and most aggressive works, referring to body functions that are neither sexually alluring or metaphorically ephemeral.

 

In one work, Lin Tianmiao conjures up a boiling surface on a plain blank canvas with an elaborately carved frame. Her bubbling tumors seem almost aliveyou are tempted to touch themand truly disgusting, in sharp contrast to the traditionalism evoked by the frame. In another similar work, an equally traditional framed canvas sprouts hair, so much hair that it falls from the surface down the wall below. Both works seems far more alive than her photographic-based installations, even though they are not as grand in scale or specific in its references to a particular body. In two other works, Lin Tianmiao stitches the shape of a misshapen body on a canvas, again frightening in its surrealistic distortion of the human figure. These are references to body functions that we prefer to leave in the doctor's office, but here they are enchanting as part of her works of art.

 

It would be easy to relate this work to classic Surrealist artists, such as Magritte or Man Ray. Indeed, Magritte himself once painted an image of a naked woman within a painting whose pubic hair grew like a beard outside the frame. Man Ray used photography, splicing negatives together, to make women shaped like violins or metronomes. But, here a woman artist is taking issue with representation of a woman's form as a cultural norm or visual reality. By distorting a single image, she inherently asserts that all representations of womenbeautiful vs. ugly, western vs. Asianare distortions.

 

Yet, we should not mistake her representations of women as self-portraits. Lin Tianmiao is present in each of these works, but not through depiction. She is present by her touch, the use of thread, the palpable imagination at work on the surfaces. This is her "artist's touch", yet it is a touch shared by all women engaged in domestic tasks. One very interesting point that should be made here is that Lin Tianmiao would not have been unaware of the development of this strain in contemporary art during the period she spent in New York. During the 1980s, in fact, women artists evolved from an early period of feminist art when artists such as Miriam Shapiro, Faith Wilding, Mimi Smith and Faith Ringgold revived domestic crafts as a feminist statement. By the late-1980s, photo-based artists, such as Cindy Sherman and Barbara Kruger, eliminated such processes from their art and replaced them with forms of mass reproduction. In her last years in New York in the early 1990s, Lin Tianmiao, then a textile artist herself, would have seen a revival of craft-based work, but this time by male and female artists and not necessarily as a feminist strategy.

 

In many ways, Lin Tianmiao's most recent work brings together all of these tendencies in contemporary art by wedding photography and handiwork. As contradictory as this may seem, this is no more a feminist statement than are Andy Warhol's Brillo Boxes, though both refer to housework and domesticity. In fact, as in the case of Brillo Boxes, Lin Tianmiao uses the domestic as a repellant, to demystify the arti-ness of her endeavor, even as it adds an element of fantasy and a "touch" of her own personality. Lin Tianmiao's process, for all that it conjures up the past, is also very much of the moment, at a time when many American artists are bringing back macram? needlepoint, knitting and doodling as a way of getting viewers' attention and tweaking their cherishment of beautiful art objects.

 

In fact, to return Roland Barthes for a minute, the challenge for a Chinese artist at this moment in history is to restore some of the mythology of Chinese culture to its art forms after a period when only political didactic speech was permitted. (Barthes would have been appalled by this conclusion, but artists can do what they want, despite the ideas of critics.) Lin Tianmiao, who has often been pigeon-holed as a Chinese feminist artist by both western and Chinese art critics, is actually engaged in this far larger and more ambitious project. How to remove Chinese art from the parameters of political act? How to exceed the designated role for Chinese artists as political content-makers for the global art world? How to accomplish all of this, in a country in the midst of rapid development where political agendas are never far from the surface?

 

None of this is easy and would be terribly boring if an artist set out to do this in ways that were other than instinctual. By openly blending traditional Chinese aesthetics and references with contemporary conceptual strategies, Lin Tianmiao both brings us closer to traditional Chinese culture while denying us total romanticization of that period. It adds her own individuality, but in ways that makes it clear that this is not the most important purpose of a work of art. And to the extent that she uses romance or nostalgia as an element in her work, it is always undercut by her visceral use of inappropriate gestures, her needle work that literally pricks away at easy resolutions, either ancient or modern.

 

It is the refutation of easy answers that is at the heart of Lin Tianmiao's inquiry. Her thread-work, maddeningly detailed and methodical, undercuts the organization of her photographs; her blurred images undercut the documentary tendencies in this work. Rather than straight-forward truths, she provides evocative ambivalence, so beautiful we forget that we are learning anything at all and so haunting that we remember that this is what art was supposed to be about all along.