Lin Tianmiao at CourtYard - Beijing

Since returning to Beijing in 1997 after a decade-long stay in New York, Lin Tianmiao has become one of China's most widely exhibited installation artists. Her works often consist of accumulations of old-fashioned, everyday objects that have been meticulously wrapped in white twine or cotton thread. The wrapping process, which preserves the objects but also changes them into useless, ghostlike forms, is meant to hint at the ever-present tension between tradition and modernization in today's China.

At CourtYard, one of the handful of active contemporary galleries in the Chinese capital, Lin revisited some of her earlier themes and struck out in new directions. A small bare tree wrapped entirely in white twine was hung upside down in the gallery's main space, recalling a similar work Lin once carried out in the Netherlands. On the floor was the installation Childhood (2002), consisting of more than 75 wrapped children's toys; these included a tiny bicycle, toy airplanes, action figures, a giraffe and a robot. There were also a few framed paintings completely encased in twine, which turned them into minimalist monochromes that sported tongue-in-cheek titles such as Family Portrait.

While traditional women's craft techniques play an important role in Lin's works, her latest installations also employ technological mediums such as video and photography. In this show, for example, there were four haunting mixed-medium portraits featuring androgynous faces rendered photographically via an inkjet image on canvas. Into each canvas, strands of thread or (in one case) actual human hair have been sewn, creating an eerie veiling effect.

The most impressive work at CourtYard was Go?, a 14-panel black-and-white photomural that Lin premiered last fall at the Cleveland Center for Contemporary Art. Go? presents nude male and female figures in a landscape setting, each contending with an awkwardly shaped bicycle covered in white twine. The panels snaked around the gallery's walls, while in front of them stood one of the actual wrapped bicycles. Lin spent a year working on the photograph: scouting locations in the countryside outside Beijing, selecting the models, staging the individual scenes and combining them in a digital montage. The work, she says, is meant to reflect the longing for a harmonious rural life that still fills many of Beijing's urban dwellers. The wrapped bicycles may appear to be impossible vehicles, but in the final panels the figures are shown soaring skyward on them--a lesson in the triumph of imagination over the constraints of reality.

COPYRIGHT 2002 Brant Publications, Inc.
COPYRIGHT 2002 Gale Group