Artist Talk: Lin Tianmiao

Internationally recognized contemporary artist Lin Tianmiao will survey her work to date while reflecting on the changes that have shifted her relationship to art, feminism, and materials.

“Lin Tianmiao is one of the most powerful female voices to emerge from and endure the vicissitudes of Chinese contemporary art over the past two decades. Since the mid-1990s, she has been making labor-intensive, traditional craft-based sculptures and installations breathtaking in their obsessive and dangerously precise transformation of everyday objects.”—Kang Kang, The Brooklyn Rail, October 2017

Lin Tianmiao (b. 1961 in Taiyuan) lives and works in Beijing. In 1984, she studied fine art at Capital Normal University, Beijing, before moving to New York in 1988, where she worked as a designer for nearly seven years. In 1995, Lin returned to China and quickly became one of the first Chinese female artists to gain international recognition.

During the 1990s, she participated in the avant-garde “apartment art” phenomenon that was emerging in Beijing and Shanghai. In 1998, Lin and her husband, video artist Wang Gongxin, created the Loft Media Center. In 2018 Lin’s large-scale solo show “SYSTEMS” was held at the Rockbund Art Museum in Shanghai. In 2012, the Asia Society Museum in New York presented “Bound Unbound,” the artist’s first major solo museum exhibition in the United States. She has exhibited in major exhibitions at the Guggenheim Museum, New York (2017); Setouchi Triennale, Takamatsu (2016); the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art (2008); the Brooklyn Museum (2007); the Museum of Modern Art, New York (2007); the Singapore Tyler Print Institute (2007); and Haus der Kulturen der Welt, Berlin (2005).

Presented by the Asian Art Affinity Group with the “Mapping Transitions through the Vehicle of the Arts” consortia.

Mia would like to thank the Henry Luce Foundation for their generous support of “Mapping Transitions through the Vehicle of the Arts,” a consortia project of the University of Minnesota, Carleton College, St. Olaf College, University of St. Thomas, Macalester College, College of Saint Benedict/ St John’s University, and the Minneapolis Institute of Art.