Unique Chinese Textile Designer Will Exhibit At First With Her ‘Phylosophy’ Art

Lin Tianmiao is a contemporary Chinese installation artist and textile designer. Through her using of everyday objects, she explores the relationship of tradition and modernization. Growing up in China as well as being a woman are the two strongest voices that Lin communicates with through her art.

By using materials which are closely tied to the maternal responsibilities of a household, Lin connects her past to China’s present.

Lin is best known for her installations. One of her earliest works, «The Proliferation of Thread Winding» (1995), included 20,000 balls of thread attached with needles to a rice paper-covered iron bed. 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 that explored suppression and boundaries using symbolic colors monochromatically to keep the attention on the object.

This year in NUNU FINE ART Lin Tianmiao will have her classic series «Seeing Shadow», «Black-White-Grey», «Blue Infrastructure» in the show, which embody the artist’s insistence on the winding elements and the deconstruction of the artifacts.

Over the last six years, Lin has collected around 2,000 words and expressions about women in various languages. Pulling from popular novels, newspapers, the internet, and colloquial dialogues, she has gathered phrases such as «Divinité», «Mori girl», and «Leftover women». This lexicon is woven into thickly raised wool forms so that viewers can feel the patterns while touching and walking on the carpets.

The exhibition will also feature a selection of new paintings and sculptures in the adjacent gallery, which continue Lin’s exploration of «Body language».

Sculptures combining bones with ordinary tools create visual puns, akin to her ‘More or Less the Same’ (2011) series. In one of the new sculptures, bones form the underside of a clothing hanger, while in another a thermometer is embedded into a bone. These contradictory materials blur the line between binaries such as subject and object, yin and yang, and interior and exterior, challenging the distinction between normal and unnormal. For Lin, bones eliminate the boundaries of social classes, cultures, political ideologies, and species in light of a shared mortality.

This fall, Lin will also be featured in Art and China after 1989: Theater of the World at the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, New York. Lin will present a solo exhibition at the Shanghai Museum of Glass, which will simultaneously feature her work in the group exhibition Annealing. In Spring 2018, Lin will also present a solo exhibition at the Rockbund Art Museum, Shanghai. Her work is in many prestigious institutions worldwide including the Brooklyn Museum, New York; Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden, Washington, D.C.; Centre Pompidou, Paris and many others.