ART-PRESENTATION: Lin Tianmiao-Systems

Since the early 1990s, as one of the first female Chinese artists tackling installation and video production, Lin Tianmiao has continuously explored various media throughout her practice. Using materials that evoke the traces and symbolism of feminine life such as cotton, thread, silk, fabric, and needles— she works on these materials by wrapping these everyday objects and covering them, thereby revealing her interest and reflection on everyday life and traditional handicrafts.

By Efi Michalarou
Photo: Rockbund Art Museum Archive

Lin Tianmiao’s solo exhibition “Systems” is a site-specific project exploring four key concepts: “individual consciousness”, “collective consciousness”, “public consciousness” and “ultimate consciousness”. Each concept corresponds to a floor in the Rockbund Art Museum in Shanghai, as visitors embark on a artistic journey. The concept of the exhibition originates from the system of the human body and draws from a range of modern critical and political theory, as well as from contemporary psychology. The exhibition comprises a body of work representative of her practice over twenty years, together with several large-scale, interactive installations, which the artist has created recently in 2017, and have never been shown before to the public. Material of archival significance will also be exhibited at the same time. From early works such as “Day-Dreamer”, “High!!!” and “Loss and Gain”, visitors can become aware of the value the artist places on material and method, as well as an artistic practice filled with a tactile deftness and vitality. In 2017, after a twenty year practice, she made a break from the traditional media she became associated with, instead choosing to use glass, in order to take on challenges never attempted before. Lin Tianmiao began a collaboration with Shanghai Museum of Glass, starting from the initial stages of grasping the peculiarities of glass, to investigating artisanal techniques, and then dealing with scientific issues such as ‘mechanical motion’ as a way to experiment within her installations. As the opening chapter of the exhibition, display the new large-scale installation “Reaction”. Visitors must to walk into the middle of the exhibition space to enter a white “enclosure” within a futuristic installation, where a series of intimate experiences and states of perception begins. Visitors are require to place their wrist onto the sensor for 5 to 10 seconds, which will gather the pulse rate, while blue fluorescent liquid drops down to a glass tube from beneath a spiral plate. Within a short time, viewers are able to see, sense, and hear their own blood in motion.  Separated by a single wall is Lin Tianmiao’s representative work “Day-Dream”. Created at the turn of the millennium, the work uses prominently white cotton thread, a cheap and ubiqitous material. On the floor is a mattress hanging in the air with a canvas as big as the mattress above; the mattress and the canvas are connected by countless vertical strands of white cotton. The fabric on the surface of the mattress is pulled upwards, with a protruding shape as though escaping from space. Under the illusion of lighting, the inter-woven cotton strands, faintly highlight a human figure, which constitutes as a deconstruction of the artist’s own image in an exploration of the formation of self-identity.  In the third hall is on show “Warm Currents”, a work connected to collective consciousness, daily experiences, and modes of living. Using glass vessels of various shapes and sizes that recall the instruments found in laboratories, an utterly unique structure is produced. A pink fluorescent liquid that symbolizes  the ‘circulation’ of life as it ‘revolves’ through processes propelled by the large apparatus of society, politics, and culture. The processes of ‘circulation’ and ‘revolution’ work in an antagonistic relationship, but they also remain mutually dependent to one another. The liquid embodies the vain struggle to break loose from the confines of a collective consciousness.   Another important early work is the video installation “High !!!”. A screen broadcasts a moving-image. Nearly ten thousand cotton threads connect the screen with the canvas, while alternating continuously between high and low frequency vibrations, which are transmit between the cotton strands and the image – the image transforms from the profile of female in color into an androgynous image in black-and-white. While the video undergoes a transformation, the sound rises from a sonorous bass to a piercing high-pitch; the experience goes between the immense to a delicate sensitivity, which is modulated by the sound and image working together at once. The large-scale installation “My Garden” has been specially commissioned for this exhibition take up the entire fourth floor of the Museum. Borrowing from the concept of public consciousness visitors are invited to take part in a “Greenhouse Garden” made of glass vessels. The entire floor is covered by a soft pink carpet; within the pink bases stand different sizes of glass tubes that resemble a forest of plants and from where different kinds of green transparent liquid is pumped around from inside. The audience is able to read vernacular names given to plants such as ‘指甲花’ (Lawsonia inermis). The point of interest for the artist is how these plants are retranslated back into English it becomes ‘nail dye flower’, which gives rise to the politics of a new kind of speech. “Loss and Gain” on the fifth floor is another highlight of this exhibition, the artist has found a way to join the commonalities between the human skeleton and everyday tools. Each tool originally possesses their own specific function and attributes; when the tools and human bones are “conjoined” together, their functions and properties become reconfigured, thereby unexpectedly extending beyond the grave issue of death and allowing new cultural values to come into being. In the sixth floor are on presentation Lin Tianmiao’s sketchbooks. Whether cross-section images, blueprints, or drawings each document is created with a meticulous attention to detail that recalls the production of an engineering blueprint, whilst also reflecting the chronological process of the artist’s creative thinking.

Info: Consulting Curator: Alexandra Munroe, Assistant Curator: Xiaorui Zhu-Nowell, Rockbund Art Museum Shanghai, 20 Huqiu Road, Huangpu District, Shanghai, Duration: 26/6-26/8/18, Days & Hours: Tue-Sun 10:00-18:00, www.rockbundartmuseum.org