Local boy makes good abroad

Two years ago, Taiwanese artist Michael Lin (林明弘) took advantage of a grant from the Ministry of Education to live and work in Paris for a year. After the year ended, he didn't come back. His roots are in Asia and, over the next few months, so is his work.

Recently in Taiwan to visit family and prepare for upcoming exhibitions, Lin elaborated on his open-armed acceptance into the French art scene and his reasons for staying there.

"There is no base of support from the private sector [in Taiwan], such as collectors or private institutions that collect art. So it becomes very difficult to make a living purely as an artist in Taiwan," he said, making reference to the number of artists who take teaching positions to supplement their income.

Conversely, France provided Lin with a wealth of opportunity. Invited in 2002 to exhibit his work at the opening of a contemporary art museum, he was simultaneously asked to take part in a group show at the Museum of Modern Art in Paris. Being in close proximity to so many other European countries and galleries, Lin said he was almost immediately invited to work in several venues around the continent.

Having left Taiwan at an early age, he was raised in the US and it wasn't until completing his masters of Fine Arts that he returned to Taiwan in 1993. He then began to utilize traditional Taiwanese and Japanese textile prints as a base for his trademark floral patterns. The print, he said, is a personal response to his own identity crisis, having spent so much of his childhood outside the country.

"I had just come back [to Taiwan] and I was grappling with my own identity in a culture I felt foreign to, yet still a part of."

Lin added that his work is also a critical reflection of the socio-political climate in Taiwan during the 80's and 90's, a time when the island was defining its own national identity. "The government was changing and there was this general question of history and a sense of nostalgia. For me it [the textile prints] represented a tradition that was being wiped out and this was my own little resistance, and preservation of a particular aesthetic value that I thought would be worth keeping."

By bringing elements such as ornamentation into his paintings he explained how, on an artistic level, his work was also a reaction to his foundation in the American tradition of neo-conceptualist and neo-minimalist art.

What began with a painting derived from traditional Taiwanese floral prints has blossomed into an ongoing exploration of ornamentation and its relationship to architecture. Making full use of exhibition spaces, the exaggerated patterns utilize walls, floors, and furniture to become functional installations that invite observers to participate in the art.

Describing his art as banal, he explained how people are physically implicated in the pieces, making the art less of an object to be contemplated and more of a space to be occupied. "When you look at a painting you stand erect and concentrate. The relationship between you and my work is perhaps closer to you and your couch than you and the painting hanging on the wall."

Lin's enormous, ornate works have been part of international biennials in Taipei (2000), Istanbul (2001), Liverpool (2002), Venice (2001) in addition to a list of solo exhibitions in Asia, Europe and the US.