Lin Tianmiao
Lin Tianmiao, born in Taiyuan, Shanxi Province in 1961, is one of the first female artists from China to achieve international recognition. Through her use of everyday objects, she explores the relationship of tradition and modernization.
During the 1980s, Lin studied in the Fine Art Department of the Capital Normal University in Beijing and got her BFA in 1984. Following her studies, she moved to New York with her husband Wang Gongxin, a celebrated video artist. They returned to China in 1995, where they now reside. Early in her career, Lin worked as a successful textile designer, later translating her experience along with the crafts of weaving, sewing, and embroidery into her practice as a visual artist.
Best known for her installations, such as The Proliferation of Thread Winding, 1995, consisting of a bed of needles linked to individually hand-wrapped balls of white cotton thread, with a monitor depicting the artist's painstaking handicraft laid beneath a sheer pillowcase, Lin also works in sculpture, photography, video, and a variety of other media. Like The Proliferation of Thread Winding, much of her work addresses women's issues. Lin links thread and the activity of binding and weaving to the female experience and her Chinese background, but the final result evokes a shared human experience for the viewer, regardless of gender, race, or nationality. Conceptual and obsessed with the intricately hand-made, Lin’s work operates within numerous dichotomies such as the private vs. public, personal vs. cultural, male vs. female, natural vs. unnatural, remembered past vs. lived present. Through the use of common materials and the transformation of quotidian objects, Lin evokes personal interpretations for each viewer while maintaining a universally recognized experience.
Since the mid-1990s, her works have been included in every major international museum show on Chinese contemporary art, as well as in many solo and group exhibitions in Beijing, Shangai, San Francisco, Paris and New York, among others. In 2001 she co-founded the Loft New Media Art Center. She had a 2006 residency at the Singapore Tyler Print Institute where she experimented with paper media and printmaking. Lin currently lives and works in Beijing, China.
Last update on 10-03-2023
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Featured Artworks
The use of cotton thread, which weaves and crawls over the face of the elderly figure, appears to mirror the inward nervous systems and veins of the body whilst resembling cables and wires of the external, mechanical world and all its chaos.
The figure, whose softness is apparent in both the muted colour palette and their pained expression, is overtaken by the winding threads which take on a life of their own as they engulf the face. The threads, therefore, appear to be part of the body, like scars and wrinkled skin, suggesting a complicated yet sympathetic portrayal of a human life in which the relationships, feelings, personality, and experiences begin to overtake the physical being.
By using materials typically associated with women and the domestic realm, like cotton thread, Tianmiao challenges our understanding of gender, dominance, and sensitivity by elevating her subjects to an ethereal, detached entity, acting as a defining the roles of both her subject and the medium.
Tianmiao's depiction of the body crosses boundaries between the real and the intangible by celebrating the woven journey undergone, in the form of thread, by her subject. However, the fragility of the piece suggests that it acts as a form of memorial or celebration of life, rather than the vein or wire-like threads bringing a sense of energy or vitality to the piece.
Focus Series
2002
Works on paper. Cotton thread on printed cotton paper mounted on aluminium.
The Foundry
Events
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Digital Bodies is an online group show curated by Stina Gustafsson, Chloe Diamond, Serena Tabacchi and Marie Chatel featuring works by Cao Fei, Damjanksi, Frenetik Void, Hackatao, Hu Weiyi, Joanne Hastie, Lin Tianmiao, Maurice Benayoun, Miao Xiaochun, Skygolpe, The Fabricant, Travis LeRoy Southworth, and Twistedsister.
“Within the digital realm, the body becomes something we can no longer touch or feel. Often, it stands detached from our actions, forcing us into new ways of associating, observing, and thinking about the body and its relationship to space.
The human body has dominated artistic visions for centuries. With the emergence of new digital instruments comes new ways of exploring what role the body plays in both physical and virtual environments. Fluid boundaries where we alternate between our real and virtual lives imply that our understanding of the body is detached and outdated.
In this exhibition, MoCDA presents artworks that challenge existing notions of the body by exploring the ways in which they are represented across media and how the representation has evolved within a digital sphere. In the first collaboration between the Museum of Contemporary Digital Art and the DSL Collection, presented for CADAF Online 2020, MoCDA seeks to examine the bodily structures that are increasingly challenged and questioned as our daily life is transported, shaped, and augmented by digital technologies.”
(The curators)