¡õ By Leo Xu
Over the past 6 years or so, Michael Lin has ranked among a group of yellow-skinned art-world darlings who have been exhibiting in a succession of biennials throughout the world, from Venice, Liverpool, Istanbul to Moscow and the forth. Lin's works, donned with folkloric textile graphic yet mostly in gigantic size, have stretched across the floors, or climbed on the walls at many museums and public spaces as well. To many, his name is related to floral graphics, peonies and plum blossoms alike, or, his work is the flora, vice versa. However, the exhibition Notre Histoire... (Palais de Tokyo, 2006) tells a different story in which Lin abandoned his signature floral graphic and breathed into his piece some refreshing air - a mural painting appropriated from some existing but reverted cartoon image. And the piece wounded up astounding many eyes looking for kitsch flowers.
"All I've been painting is the pattern, not the actual flower." explained Lin, highlighting the word pattern. And evidently enough, Lin's patterns are all appropriations from textiles available in the local markets. Patterns, a readymade in Lin's case, have nothing to do with flowers when duplicated or scaled-up onto canvases, walls, floors and the like.
My very first encounter with Lin's work dates back to the Paris-based artists' show Odyssey (Shanghai Gallery of Art, 2004). In the middle of the gallery stood a huge skateboard slope waiting for skateboarders to gallop to and fro. Once the recreational sport facility was accommodated in the somehow hierarchical gallery space that was supposed to wear a put-you-off poker-face, intervention was hence enacted to emulate the smell-like-teen-spirits coolness over this curvy slope, bewildering many gallery-goers in search of scholarly and in-depth interpretations. Also the installation rang a bell to the recurring depictions of such a sport in many others' works, say, Larry Clark in particular. "I used to be a skateboarder," Lin recalled. Instead of the more predictable graffiti, the monstrous slope was coated in a shining red, popular local fabric graphic which, by contrasting the flying skateboarder, revealed the culture shock the artist attempted to address. And such culture shock, as the typical west-coastal product met the local Chinese, brought the viewers to wonder about the background of its author.
Two years later I paid a visit to Michael Lin's Shanghai studio wherein I witnessed a body of his then ongoing project - replicates on canvas of "Tai Bao Zheng (Mainland Travel Permit for Taiwan Residents)", with green cover and golden texts, a very outspoken political statement. And while he was articulating in his fluent English, his stories started to unfold.
Born to a family prominent in Taiwan's cultural development in the mid-20th century, Lin spent most of his childhood on the island and left with parents for the U.S at the age of 9, due in no small part to the political turmoil bursting out in the early 1970s. Despite a brief return to Taiwan, Lin found it hard to adapt to local schools taught only in Chinese, and therefore, he chose to complete his study in the States. The year 1993 marked a crossroad in Lin's life as he flew back to Taiwan. As his career took off, he was confronted for the first time with a notable culture shock and the unexpected identity issue.
Initially, Lin was serving as bartender at IT Park, an alternative space for contemporary art in Taipei. A recent graduate who was still obsessed with monochrome painting and weighed idealism over social reality, he did not expect to face an array of questions from the spectators, such as "Where are the artworks on display?" and "Is this art?" Such feedback from the public had helped him knock open the door to a then undefined art domain for him. In his first solo exhibition Meander (IT Park, 1994), Lin produced a body of monochrome clapboards to be installed in the gallery the way they were supposed to be in a Men's bathroom. Unlike other artists, Lin, as artist-bartender of this venue, was able to observe viewers' reaction to the exhibits. A member of the audience might lean against or step back in the cabinet constructed by the clapboards to answer his ringing mobile phone, an unconscious move that aroused the artist's great interest. "I just began to think about the distance between art and environment, the audience and me. Rather than subconscious, their act was more from the body, from the memory of body." Since then on, Lin has employed a more inward thinking, clearly demonstrated in his conception about home and private space.
In 1996, Lin transplanted his home furniture into the gallery and invited visitors to interact with the show Interior (IT Park) as he suggested "please remove your shoes before stepping on the carpet and feel free to choose from the selection of music". Rather than a mere deconstructive experiment of converting the gallery into a private house, Interior played a crucial role as the turning point in Lin's practice wherein debuted his fabric paintings. In selecting the elements best illustrating the definition of home, he picked from the bedrooms some pillows which to his mind bore an air of intimacy. "I measured them, 75×75 cm each. Then I called the framer and ordered stretchers of the same size. I took pictures of the pillows and projected them onto the canvas. I got it started..." The whole project went smoothly as Lin can still recall. "I have the same fabrics at home!" some viewers claimed, while others expressed the fabrics were products of their grandmas' era. But the enormous interest and enthusiasm about the exhibits aroused among the spectators were not something Lin had expected with the household stuff. No doubt Lin's appropriated pattern from ethical textiles hit the nostalgia of the local, or in other words, the collective memories in the context of globalization.
And memories of this kind meant quite a lot to Lin, who had just embarked on his career and settled down in his hometown. Having grown up abroad, this trilingual artist, sometimes unable to articulate in his mother tongue Chinese without the help of foreign language, was baffled by the issues of cultural identity. More exactly, his return to Taiwan had thrown him in a moment of rethinking about the relationship between him and the West, China and his hometown. Quite different than his peers from mainland China who refined their visual lexicon by sampling so-called Chinese Elements, Lin, as a typically global child sandwiched by streams of Western and Chinese cultures, saw his origin with his much more westernized eyes. As with his English-influenced Chinese, Lin's initial visual vocabularies adopted a Western accent likely to be misunderstood as certain exoticism favored by current western fetish eyes. Highly inspired by western scholars like Foucault and Elaine Scarry, Lin pushed his exploration of private space and bodily memory to the reinvention of vernaculars.
Patterns, those of traditional fabris in particular, have constituted the tactics Lin employs to examine the vernaculars. His phoenix, peonies and plum blossoms are concerned with China's current social context, while for the piece at The Hague's City Hall (Atrium Stadhuis Den Hagg, 12.07-08.08, 2002) Lin painted tulips to respond to the Dutch locality -- the gigantic piece has since become a landmark in Lin's practice. The strategic use of decorative patterns and signs led Lin beyond the recognition of individuality and identity at his early stage towards a macro framework of societies. In his oeuvres, Spring (2003), a radical example of social investigation, attests to sucha shift. Commissioned by the Italian furniture brand Moroso, the artist rendered the living room a space with a pronounced preference for commercial value and a sense of hierarchy. And the carpet painting is an unexceptional ppropriation from an Afghanistan textile, but no flora nor fauna this time. Albeit the authentic local crafts, the painting captured a bloodletting chapter in the history, picturing relentless bombs and tanks, an explicit depiction of Russian's invasion between 1979 and 1989. Ironically enough, those fabrics would end up being sold to the Russians. By duplicating the graphics, Lin paraphrased outrageous violence and conflicts in the mundane world and Spring summoned anyone in this artist-made living room to face the bloody reality rather than searching for Lin's narrative on the internal and identity one might expect of his works.
So far Lin has lifted the exploration of vernaculars to a new level. After translating the exhibition space into a skateboard playground, he repainted the tennis court with his distinctive graphic patterns so as to deconstruct the public facility's functionality by his sense of humor (The Contemporary Museum, Honolulu, May-December 2005). In Lin's art, vernaculars bridge different times and spaces. Take his 25?5m mural painting at The Kunstkinie Theatre and Cultural Center (Almere, Netherlands, 2006) for example. The image was borrowed from an African-style fabric and associated with oceans and the aboriginal. Lin came to realize through a great deal of researches that Dutch learned batik in Indonesia. On their way back to Netherlands, some of them Dutch dropped by in Africa and found a notably potential market for those textiles. They studied local graphic patterns, and then designed (probably copyrighted) the textiles back in Netherlands and sell the products to Africa afterwards. Since the mid-20th century, most of the fabric in Africa's market are manufactured or designed in Netherlands. Inspired by the anecdote, Lin's huge mural not only connects two separate spaces with the special decorative graphic, but also reflects artist's own nostalgia - the ocean-and-fabric narrative has also linked his practice with all the places he has been to - Lin studied in LA, started his career in Taiwan, resided in Paris and now opened a studio in Shanghai. Through this circle of life he has eventually enriched his visual repertoire.
Parallel to Lin's discovery of vernaculars as one of his main recipes, his ever growing interest in redefining spaces can be traced back as early as in his solo debut Meander that embedded toilet cabinets into gallery space and dropped audience hints of updated functions of the space. The re-functionality has since frequented his later outputs, for instance, in the carpet pieces at Palais de Tokyo and PS1. Following Meander, Interior (IT Park, 1996) and Imported (La Ferme du Buisson, 1998) saw his increasing ambition in renovating the spatial context. Interior, as the title may suggest, turned the gallery into a living room, and invited viewers to participate to complete the work, and it therefore challenged the ritual way of appreciating, or more exactly, worshipping the art. Hence, the gallery as a hard space according to the artist was upgraded into a more intimate soft site. 600 bottles of beers, 200 packs of cigarettes and several chairs, Imported went more concrete with a regional twist mimicking the day-to-day life in his hometown. As a result, the showroom inherited the look and smell of the hustle and bustle of everyday life. More lately Lin launched in an art fair a Sample House (CIGE, 2006) parodying the typical temporal booth widely seen in local business operation. All Lin's attempts of this kind may seem in common with Rirkrit Tiravanija's approach in materializing his gallery-based curry kitchen. However, the difference is Lin's approach lies in restructuring the transitional space, which explains why he has been exhibiting successively in the caf? passage and entrance of museums and galleries. And his interest has even expanded and covered the interactivity with peripheral space.
Phaidon's latest release Vitamin P includes Michael Lin together with some other names also specializing in painting-installation, such as Federico Herrero who showed with Lin in Urgent Painting (Musée d?rt Moderne de la Ville de Paris, 2002). The works of both seem to emancipate the painting from stretchers and extend it into the open space; their art both began with questioning social-cultural identities, but the former focusing on the drastic issues concerning individual's global living while the latter probing into the geographic novelties. In this sense, Vitamin P comes to prove the painting-installation as one of the new critical perspectives in painting today. "I am passionate about painting. I like to dealing with many issues with brushes. Actually a great number of theories in contemporary art stemmed from painting. Painting is one of the roots." Lin said.
Judging from the trajectory of Lin's career, the interdisciplinary is conspicuously a major influence. "One of the best things of being an artist is you can try whatever you like. You can either make installation or try a bit of design." Lin commented on his identity as artist. Same as Hussein Chalayan who breaks borders between art and fashion, showing widely in museums and biennials, Lin is trying to smash the stereotypes within various disciplines, say, painting, site-specific installation or so-called painting-installation, etc. During the past a couple of years, Lin has succeeded in many collaborative projects -- ranging from the interior design for Dolce & Gabanna's house, Moroso's commission to the collaboration with illy, etc -- that integrate art into design, functionality into contemporary aesthetics. And Lin's case in general fits in Nicolas Bourriaud's Relational Aesthetics. According to Bourriaud, the Relational Art refers to a set of artistic practices which take as their theoretical and practical point of departure the whole of human relations and their social context, rather than an independent and private space. And Lin in turn put it much simpler: produce a clearing to allow for voices, ideas, and sensations of excess (Palais de Tokyo's book What Is the Artist's Role Today?).