Lin Tianmiao 林天苗

 

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Born in 1961 in Taiyuan, Shanxi Province, Lin Tianmiao became a practicing artist relatively late after almost eight years sustaining a successful textile business. After several years in New York City, where she developed a love for fine arts, Lin returned to China and currently works in Beijing.

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[edit] Date & Place of Birth

Lin Tianmiao was born in 1961 in Taiyuan Shanxi Province, China.

[edit] Childhood & Family

Lin had a marked childhood talent for patterns. Several years later, she turned that talent into a career, working as a successful textile designer in New York before becoming an artist.

[edit] Education & Development

Lin graduated from the Fine Arts Department at the Capital Normal University in Beijing in 1984. She later studied at the Art Student League in New York City in the late 1980s.

[edit] Art

Since 1998, Lin has created a series of pale, ghost-like photographic images of herself on canvas, hanging them on semi-transparent screens in exhibition spaces.

[edit] Braiding

In her 1998 exhibition, entitled Braiding, Lin installed a twelve-foot-tall canvas in which the grey tones of the image of her face were softened by stitches running randomly throughout the surface, each with its threads stretching out of the floor and coiling beneath. The threads are intended to represent the tiny habits and customs that make up a culture, and the difficulty of breaking free.

(Below: Braiding, photo print on silk and cotton canvas. 1998)

[edit] Focus

In Focus, Lin sought to examine issues related to portraiture, identity, and gender. She propelled her technique in a new direction, attempting to refine her abilities to work with various materials and challenge herself further. She says, “For me, each work represents its own challenges to be overcome.” 

In this series, the viewer is meant to decide how to interpret a large format facial picture. Lin does not try to crowd the surface of her works with unnecessary ornament. Instead, she relishes in the calm simplicity of the work, and hopes the audience feels the same. “The goal is to give the audience something pure and simple," she says.  "[Something] that is in fact imbued with a great deal of meaning and expression.” 
                                                                                                                                                (Right: Focus, mixed media. 2001)

[edit] Hand Signals

Lin created the Hand Signals series as a response to several questions posed toward the Peking Opera. Though impressed by the Opera, she wondered why men were enlisted to play women’s parts. She relates in an interview, “Why go through this change of gender roles? Why are hand movemets of Peking Opera actors so important as a visual language used to express so many activities and movements with such quiet subtlety?” This series of questions led Lin to create Hand Signals in the hope of answering these questions, and the social investigations they represent. By the end of the series, however, she had not found her answers. She says, “while we live here in China, we in fact don’t really understand China’s traditions such as those of the Peking Opera.” She finds her understanding of the Opera and many other Chinese fine art traditions very limited, but believes the subtle gesture of the hand can remain fixed forever in the viewer’s memory.
(Left: Handsignals, photo prints on canvas, silk and cotton threads. 2005-8)

[edit] Auctions & Acquisitions

For a list of collections containing works by Lin Tianmiao, click here

[edit] Exhibitions

Though Lin participated in a few group youth exhibitions in China in the early 1980s, she did not present as a professional artist until 1988 at City Gallery in New York. Throughout the 1990s and the new Millennium, Lin has shown her works in several exhibitions ranging from the International Istanbul Biennial to the ICA Institute of Contemporary Art in London to the Shanghai Gallery of Art. For Lin's CV, please click here.

[edit] References

http://www.lintianmiao.com/

[1]http://museum.icp.org/museum/exhibitions/china/perform01.html
http://www.pekinfinearts.com/artists/lintianmiao/LinTianmiaocv.pdf


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