Michael Lin

Biography

In 1996, at the IT Park gallery in Taipei, a sign lay on a carpet: “Please remove your shoes before stepping on to the carpet.” Michael Lin had moved part of his home furnishings into the exhibition space: two carpets, a stereo, his music collection. Visitors were invited to choose what to listen to.

The show was called “Interior”.

Lin was born on 6 November 1964 in Tokyo to a Taiwanese family and grew up in Taiwan. In 1973 the family, at a time of political uncertainty for the island, moved to Los Angeles. There he became interested in the local art scene and in skateboarding. In 1990 he graduated from the Otis Art Institute of Parsons School of Design, and in 1993 he received an MFA from the Art Center College of Design in Pasadena. Among those who influenced him he names Daniel Buren, Dan Graham, Franz West, the essayist Elaine Scarry and the directors of Taiwanese New Wave cinema: Hou Hsiao-hsien, Tsai Ming-liang and Edward Yang.

In 1993 Lin moved to Taipei. His early mentor was a relative on his father’s side, the artist Richard Lin. For two years Lin worked as a bartender at IT Park, an independent artist-run gallery, where he met like-minded artists and began to exhibit. His first solo show, “Meander” (1994), consisted of monochrome steel panels that he had spray-painted at an auto body shop: at art school he had learned to work with car lacquer and the spray gun. The Taipei public received his minimalist aesthetic, rooted in Los Angeles car culture, coolly. “Interior” was his answer. Lin conceived of the artist as host and the viewer as guest, and from then on built his work on public participation and everyday objects.

The same show saw the first floral motifs. At home Lin had come across embroidered muslin pillowcases and remembered the patterns that, in the countryside, decorated the bedding given as part of a wedding dowry. He made frames the size of the pillows, projected the pattern onto canvas and painted it in colour. In 1998, in “House”, a floral pattern filled an entire wall of 45 square metres, and in “Complementary” paintings of pillowcases were paired with a raised tatami mat and real pillows. In 1999 IT Park showed two Le Corbusier LC-2 chairs partly upholstered in fabric with the same pattern.

At the 2000 Taipei Biennial Lin covered the floor of the entrance hall of the Taipei Fine Arts Museum with peonies and phoenixes and laid out cushions with the same design. Invitations from abroad followed. In 2001 he represented Taiwan at the Venice Biennale and took part in the Istanbul Biennial, and in 2002 in the Gwangju Biennale. In 2002 he moved to Paris and painted the floor of the café at the Palais de Tokyo; in 2005, at the Biennale de Lyon, he covered La Sucrière with a 100-square-metre mural of an enlarged wallpaper pattern. In 2004 at MoMA PS1 in New York he installed an indoor skateboard half-pipe with a floral motif. At the Kunsthalle Wien (2005) he covered the windows with patterns and left the gallery empty, so that the glass pavilion looked like an enormous oriental lamp.

From 2006 Lin lived in Shanghai. In “Island Life” (2006), alongside paintings based on Uyghur and Tibetan carpets, hung a painting of a Tai Bao Zheng, the travel permit that Taiwanese need to enter mainland China. For “I am the Sun” (2009) he wrapped thousands of books at the Eslite Bookstore in Taipei in pink paper with phoenixes and peonies, and titled the work “21.2.1972” after the date of Richard Nixon’s visit to China. Not all his projects were floral: for “What a Difference a Day Made” (2008) he bought out an entire daily goods store and displayed its contents in the gallery, catalogued, and in “Place Libre” (2013) he turned the gallery into a free parking lot. In 2010 large floral paintings decorated the façade of the Vancouver Art Gallery. In 2012 at the Rockbund Art Museum in Shanghai he worked with the architecture firm Atelier Bow-Wow and the video artist Cheng Ran to build a temporary workers’ dormitory, painted the interior with a pattern taken from bedding used by Shanghai laborers, and filmed the whole process.

In 2016 Lin left Shanghai and now divides his time between Taipei and Brussels. In Manila he exchanged the tarps on local pedicabs for tarps of his own design: the old ones were shown in the exhibition, the new ones rode around the city. In 2017, for the National Gallery of Victoria, he painted a floor together with local artists. In 2019 at the Taipei Fine Arts Museum he made the installation “24/7”, with tatami mats, walls and cushions in the colours of Taiwanese convenience stores. In 2020 his digital work based on traditional Taiwanese window patterns was shown on the side of the Taipei 101 skyscraper, and in the same year he painted a floor of 1,300 square metres for the plaza of Museo Jumex, after a popular Mexican tablecloth pattern. In 2022 the installation “Pentachrome” appeared at the Metropolitan Museum of Art, based on vases from the museum’s Chinese ceramics collection.

Lin has collaborated with Moroso, Dolce & Gabbana, Louis Vuitton, illy and Le Méridien hotels, and in 2008 made a floral mosaic floor for the Chanel Mobile Art Pavilion, designed by Zaha Hadid. Critics associate him with the circle of Relational Aesthetics. He himself has said that the relationship with his works is closer to that between a person and a sofa than between a person and a painting.