michael lin
DESCRIPTION
Michael Lin catalogTRANSCRIPT
Michael Lin
Published byContemporary Art Museum St. Louis3750 Washington BoulevardSt. Louis, Missouri 63108www.contemporarystl.org
This publication was prepared on the occasion of the exhibition
Michael Lin
Organized by Shannon Fitzgerald, Curator, for the Contemporary Art Museum St. Louis.
This project is supported in part by a grant from the National Endowment for the Arts with additional support from the Nimoy Foundation, the Taipei Cultural Center, Taipei Economic and Cultural Office in New York, the Regional Arts Commission, and the Arts & Education Council.
Copyright © 2004 Contemporary Art Museum St. Louis, the authors, and the artistAll rights reserved.
ISBN 0-9712195-4-0Library of Congress Control Number: 2004108507
Edited by Ivy Cooper
Photography of Michael Lin wedding by Suzy Gorman St. Louis installation photography by Jay Fram and Michael Lin.
Design by Bruce BurtonPrinted by Advertisers Printing Company, St. Louis, Missouri Bound by Universal Bookbindery, Inc., San Antonio, Texas
EndSheets: Unlimited (detail), 2003, poster/wallpaper. Produced by Palais de Tokyo, Paris, Galerie Tanit, Munich, and Moroso, Udine, Italy.
4 Director’s Forward Paul Ha
5 Acknowledgments Shannon Fitzgerald
8 Confluence Shannon Fitzgerald
38 The Architect and The Housewife Frances Stark
58 Artist Biography
60 Artist Bibliography
61 Frances Stark Biography
In Sickness and In Health and Spring 2003 present the first major exhibition and installation by the Paris and Taipei based artist Michael Lin in the United States. The exhibition reaffirms Contemporary Art Museum St. Louis’ continued commitment to groundbreaking exhibitions and to commissioning new work. I am grateful to Michael Lin for providing us with his installations and I am proud to participate in bringing his work to the public.
We have set a positive precedent by collaborating with one of our most valuable local resources—Washington University in St. Louis. I want to thank Chancellor Mark S. Wrighton, Jeff Pike, Mark S. Weil, and especially Katherine Kuharic and the students at Washington University in St. Louis who eagerly volunteered to be apprentices. I am grateful to Andrew Millner and Cecile Laffonta for their invaluable assistance with the exhibition. Tony Montano, Suzy Gorman, Craig Kaminer, and Karin Moody proved to us that they are valuable community partners during this exhibition through their vital contributions.
We are indebted to those whose generosity has made the exhibition and the accompanying catalog possible. Our thanks to Wendy Clark and the National Endowment for the Arts, Katherine DeShaw and the Nimoy Foundation, Robert P. Liu and the Taipei Cultural Center, Taipei Economic and Cultural Office in New York, Jill McGuire and the Regional Arts Commission, Jim Weidman and the Arts & Education Council, and Noree Boyd and Mary McElwain of the Missouri Arts Council.
As always, the entire Contemporary’s staff contributed immeasurably to make Michael’s exhibition a success, but I must single out a few staff members who went beyond what has become the staff’s normal tireless dedication to the museum. Curatorial Assistant Andrea Green deserves recognition, as do Brandon Anschultz and Mike Schuh for successfully coordinating and installing the complicated exhibition.
I want to thank our board president Susan Sherman for her tireless support on every level for the Contemporary and myself. I know that both she and I humbly accept the daily challenges of this institution and I couldn’t have asked for a better partner for the journey. I also want to acknowledge all the current board members for their boundless support of the Contemporary. I also welcome David Diener, Arnold Donald, and Michael Staenberg to our board. I hope you enjoy that as a group we challenge, question, and learn from our exhibitions and programs and
each other. I especially want to thank Ann Lipton for stepping in to help with one of the concerns of our capital project.
In closing, great credit goes to the curator Shannon Fitzgerald for bringing new work to St. Louis that challenges viewers and their experiences in our museum. Shannon’s curatorial insight brings currency and impact to our community’s current impression of contemporary art. As a colleague I thank her for sharing with me her knowledge and perspectives on contemporary art and her unfailing advocacy for those artists untested and soon to be discovered.
Paul HaDirector
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There are many individuals who dedicated themselves to bringing Michael Lin’s exhibition and catalog to fruition for which I express my sincere gratitude.
My thanks to the Contemporary’s Director, Paul Ha, for supporting me in my decisions to organize this important exhibition and produce its catalog, which involved the production of new work, the presentation of recent work, the exploration into new materials, a billboard, and alas, a wedding! Indeed this project was ambitious, and I am grateful to the Contemporary’s Board and entire staff for sharing my enthusiasm for Michael’s work and their passion for contemporary art in St. Louis.
I am extremely appreciative for the dedication of Exhibitions Manager Brandon Anschultz, who along with his crew installed this exhibition with great care. Thanks to Registrar Michael Schuh for his adeptness in the handling of international shipping and facilitating loans for this project. Together, Brandon and Michael worked on the production and installation of this exhibition with a devoted sensitivity to Michael Lin’s vision. Curatorial Assistant Andrea Green deserves recognition for her continued energy and capable assistance on all aspects of the exhibition and the production of its catalog. Thanks to curatorial intern Danielle Freeman for her keen administrative assistance. In the development department, I would like to thank Director of Development Susan Werremeyer and Annual Fund Manager Brigitte Foley, for helping me secure the funds necessary to undertake this project.
I thank Kelly Scheffer, Director of Education & Outreach, and artist Robert Goetz for facilitating a great workshop with Michael Lin and our teen art program New Art in the Neighborhood. Just as Michael filled our windows with his artwork, he led these young artists in creating a window installation uniquely informed by their own expressions. As always, it was a pleasure to work with a fabulous group of adult docents from the Contemporary Art Partnership, whose dedication and passion for discussing art is becoming quite acclaimed. Thank you!
For the attention and sensitivity to the catalog design and working on the many details directly with Michael, my gratitude goes to Graphic Designer Bruce Burton. I am indebted to Frances Stark for her essay
The Architect and The Housewife. She was most generous in allowing us to reprint this insightful essay that is wonderfully illustrated with her drawings. Frances related to Michael’s work as an artist and deftly identified interests and strengths that continue to inform his work. I was thrilled to invite Ms. Stark to reprint this essay for the Contemporary; her work explores relationships, domesticity, gender, and romance through a consideration of comfort. These notions are fully realized in Michael’s exhibition here, culminating in the ultimate union, a wedding. I thank Ivy Cooper for her meticulous eye and thoughtful care in the editing of this publication.
Critical to the production of Michael Lin’s work is a sense of community and collaboration. Traveling across the globe, Michael relies on the talents of artists in each city to help him realize new work. In St. Louis eight artists and ten students worked for three weeks on the installation of his work. I thank Katherine Kuharic, who encouraged her students from Washington University School of Art to take this opportunity.Many thanks to Cecile Laffonta and Andy Millner for leading and inspiring the team of artist apprentices.
I extend a warm thanks to the recently wed bride and groom, Tiffany and Lorne Livingston, who embraced Michael’s invitation to wed in his new piece, In Sickness and In Health, at the Contemporary. They possessed a spirited spontaneity that resulted in a truly remarkable experience.
Finally, I thank Michael Lin who has created an exceptional work of art specifically for this exhibition and whose flexibility allowed me to consider two distinct bodies of work in one exhibition, offering a compelling exploration into his practice. I appreciate his sensibility and his willingness to explore new materials and take risks that made this collaboration so interesting.
Shannon FitzgeraldCurator
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In Sickness and In Health, 2004, Contemporary Art Museum St. Louis. Photograph: Jay Fram.
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Spring 2003, 2004, installation view at the Contemporary Art Museum St. Louis. Photograph: Jay Fram.
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ConfluenceShannon Fitzgerald
Michael Lin creates large-scale installations that explore painting, design, ornamentation, and culture through an interaction with architecture. His installations are environments or aesthetic slices of life that invite the viewer to share the space of art and architecture in socially contemplative ways. They are sites of confluence, where disparate social and aesthetic elements come together to mingle. His social junctures are similar to staged sets, yet with a discerning consideration of their immediate environments as a means to ease tensions and connect to a locality. The confluence occurs when high meets low; the banal becomes exceptional; decoration obscures culture; tradition meets contemporaneity; form meets function; and, most importantly, the social collides with the aesthetic.
Lin advocates the simplicity of being by embracing the experience of the everyday (a wedding, a meeting, and a living room). By using equally simple materials (common fabrics, house paint, and plywood) he extends an invitation to the viewer to “use” his work. His installations act as vernacular intersections where the hierarchical structures of painting, culture, museum practice, and social exchange are momentarily subverted.
For this exhibition, Michael Lin presents two projects: a new site-specific piece commissioned by the Contemporary, In Sickness and In Health, and a timely piece created last year entitled Spring 2003. Lin’s now trademark hand-painted wood “carpets” ground each installation and create opportunities for physical encounters with art. Carl Andre, who first laid minimal grids on the floor to be walked on, in part informs Lin’s floors. But while Andre’s lead “carpets” addressed high modernism and pure geometry, Lin’s take the seriousness out of “taking painting off the wall” by exaggerating and (re)presenting several vernacular languages at once. This strategy enables notions of enjoyment and leisure to surface in his work. Equally important to the viewing of Lin’s work is the notion of utilizing the work, and the visitors’ access to painting, design, and decoration is visceral and immediate. As they enter, sit, and relax, they become part of the work.
In Sickness and In Health
Long interested in Asian textiles, Lin appropriates designs from Taiwanese floral fabrics, the kind of readily available cotton cloth that would be part of a bridal dowry and used to create bed linens for the newlyweds. His patterns reference the everyday, domesticity, and a retro interest in a novelty that has long been out of fashion among Lin’s generation. As most products of popular culture slip in and out of favor, these fabrics are now resurfacing as trendy commodities in Asian and European markets. Lin explains that “In Taiwan they are immediately recognizable as traditional motifs found on bedspreads from the recent past. In Europe they are seen in relation to the tradition of decoration and painting. […] I am not so much interested in the floral motifs in a traditional iconographical or symbolic way. It is more important to me that they are familiar and relate to us in a sensual way.”1 Lin explores both the continuity of tradition as seen through an aspect of popular culture and the disjuncture in that tradition where new meanings and interpretations collide.
For In Sickness and In Health, Lin effectually metamorphoses the museum into a “domestic” space that also functions as a “sacred” site or temporary wedding chapel.
In Sickness and In Health is, one, a proposition to bring two people together within the framework of an exhibition inside the museum, to allow the private use of the museum by the communityas a gathering place, to open up the exhibition space, andto emphasize the importance of the exhibition as an event. And two, to bring into dialogue ornamentation and the museum architecture, to propose an intervention into the architecture of the museum itselfby way of a language of ornamentation, patterns, screens, andstained glass windows.2
During a site visit to the Contemporary in October 2003, Lin was inspired by the museum’s new space, but also, interestingly, by the institution’s recent rental of the space for special events. The fact that weddings were taking place in the space brought about an immediate response from the artist. After appropriating bridal fabrics for over a decade, Lin decided he would orchestrate not only a setting for a wedding, but an actual wedding.
Lin considers the gallery space a stage set, and his installation, inserted into the existing architecture, becomes the focal point of all activities for its duration. Vibrant red floral-pattern floors bisect the gallery, while highly abstract and painterly purple flower
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1 Michael Lin, quoted in Erik Lindner’s essay Made in Taiwan: Michael Ming Hong Lin lays out a fields of tulips in the Atrium in The Hague, Gallery Guide for Lin’s exhibition Michael Lin: Atrium Stadhuis Den Haag, 2002, Atrium Foundation, The Hague, the Netherlands, 2002.
2 Taken from the artist’s proposal for this exhibition prepared in October 2003.
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Please remove your shoes before stepping on the carpet and feel free to choose from the selection of music, 1996, carpet, music, photo, statementof greetings from the host, installation, dimensions variable, IT Park Gallery, Taipei, Taiwan.
Blueprint detail: The Lin Family Manor, Wufeng, Taiwan.
IT Park 31.07-21.08.1999, 1999, emulsion on floor, 13’ 11” x 33’ 7,” IT Park Gallery, Taipei, Taiwan.
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Untitled Cigarette Break, 1999, installation. IT Park Gallery, Taipei, Taiwan.
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petals transform the clerestory above into super-flat stained glass windows. The enormous colorful petals cast a dancing light that softens the hard edges of the museum’s concrete, steel, and white wall surfaces. Lin also fills the large street-level windows with semi-transparent screens quoting wood latticework. Appropriated from 19th century Chinese architectural drawings, the screen designs are tripled in scale and create a sense of privacy that lends the room intimacy. As light moves through the space, the predominance of red and purple creates a warm, blushing glow. The entire work conveys a sensuality, and is ultimately a seductive space:
This is the role of the patterns—not only do they deliver sensuality to our eyes, but the domestic history of their origins invests them with warmth. Patterns create boundaries, visual and emotional, providing comfort in their repetition. The sensual envelops us, but still leaves us space to move. We retain our own skin, it is not constricted, rather we become more aware of it, aware of its shapes and what it feels, by the presence of another element sensory, sensational, carnal, sensuous, the sensorial movement of bodies.3
Lin offered his “chapel” in a lottery and a wedding occurred the night before the exhibition opened. In Sickness and In Health was conceptually and ritually inaugurated in the private ceremony. The public experiences the installation after the fact, and the only indicators of the wedding are two photographs of the bride and groom mounted on the wall and the associative power of the installation’s title. Distanced in time from the event itself, the viewer imagines the exchange of marriage vows that occurred on the site. The words “in sickness and in health” have been uttered innumerable times with heartfelt promise and devotion. Lin likewise considers this bond from a decidedly romantic perspective. His installation is a palpable place to celebrate this universally recognized union as well as the confluence of other relationships, especially the private and public, the sacred and secular.
Lin moved back to Taipei in 1993 after having emigrated to the United States as a child. In his new home, so familiar yet so foreign, he began to focus on his immediate domestic surroundings and to paint small-scale representations of items that filled his new home. In his third solo exhibition, Complimentary (Dimension Endowment of Art, 1998) in Taipei, he literally quotes, in paint, his own personal fabric
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3 Mahoney, Bronwyn, “Patterns of Thought: The Installations of Michael Lin,” Yishu Journal of Contemporary Chinese Art, Spring, 2003, p. 83.
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Pillow #7, 1997-1998, oil on canvas, 29” x 29,” Dimensions Endowment of Art, Taipei, Taiwan.
Pillow #6, 1997-1998, oil on canvas, 33” x 33,” Dimensions Endowment of Art, Taipei, Taiwan.
Complementary, 1998, pillows on tatami on wood, 8’ 9” x 8’ 9” x 19,” Fukuoka Asian Art Museum, Fukuoka, Japan.
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pillows. On a raised platform bed, casually strewn pillows invite the viewers to lie down and contemplate framed paintings of the objects they rest their heads on. These fabrics, made into pillows then transformed into paintings, are the foundation of all subsequent projects, including In Sickness and In Health and Spring 2003. Lin made several subsequent “day beds” as contributions to large-scale international group exhibitions. In the middle of biennials and triennials held in Japan, Finland, and Turkey, he offers the viewers relief in the form of a relaxing platform bed positioned just outside the packed galleries. This early exploration became Lin’s fodder, enabling him to push his practice off the wall and onto the floor, and to begin to test the social structure of things and places.
This early work is important to the full development of In Sickness and In Health. Soon after his first project, the referential objects start to disappear from Lin’s work and increasingly become implied. The scale of his work increases enormously, and his recent installations (a bar, a café, a skateboard ramp) are fully realized by the activity occurring within them. The installation at the Contemporary marks a departure, in that the primary activity was a single event—the wedding. Yet the installation remains. Just as his earlier painted pillows, framed on a wall, referred to actual pillows, the two framed photographs of the wedding signify the function of the space. The viewer experiences the space to its fullest with the suggestion of desire, romance, and sentimentality imparted by the photographs.
Many artists have used the theme of the wedding or marriage in their work, from Marcel Duchamp to contemporaries such as Sophie Calle, who has regularly explored various psychological aspects ofthe wedding, and Meschac Gaba, whose own marriage in theStedelijk Museum in Amsterdam offered an institutional critique of the wedding. Like his colleagues, Lin is interested in the social dynamics of such a consecrated domain. Yet his work is lessabout the artist’s insertion of self into the narrative and traditional institution of marriage than it is about the spaces in whichthese bonds take place.
Indeed, an aura of warmth permeates the gallery as Lin combines expectation, tradition, and romance within a highly aestheticized space. His large floor possesses a complimentary relationship to the space; it possesses the exact dimensions of its adjacent walland sweeps the visitor down the flowery aisle to an invisible center or “altar” of the institution of marriage.
Meanwhile, in downtown St. Louis, a billboard reproducing the exact
top to bottom:
In Sickness and In Health (detail), 2004, Contemporary Art Museum St. Louis. Photograph: Bruce Burton.
Billboard, 2004, Contemporary Art Museum St. Louis. Photograph: Andrea Green.
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pattern and scale of the floor in In Sickness and In Health stands above the highway, referring drivers to the Contemporary’s Web site. As an artwork and an advertisement, the billboard is reminiscent of Daniel Buren’s insistent duplication of his trademark stripes, which effectively expanded the artist/audience dialogue beyond the institution. Just as Buren claimed his stripes, perhaps Lin is embarking on similar journey in claiming a recognizable motif: a signature logo in his floral patterns.
Spring 2003
Made in collaboration with the Italian furniture company, Moroso, Spring 2003 is both a work of art and a domestic space for respite.4 The piece conflates the domestic and the public, becoming an intimate and soothing environment, much like a living room, with ambient lighting, bold flower-upholstered furniture, wallpaper, and an enormous framed mirror. Underlying it all is a floor painting appropriating patterns on Afghan rugs made in the 1970s and 1980s during the Russian occupation of Afghanistan. The viewers immediately become part of the work as they enter the piece. The mirror allows viewers to locate themselves within the work, creating an awareness of their intimate relationship to their environment. But any sense of intimacy or privacy is betrayed by the architectural openness that surrounds Spring 2003. Like a movie set, the installation only suggests intimate enclosure. In reality, it is exposed to viewing from all sides, and from the museum’s upper levels.
In Spring 2003, Lin blends multiple cultures and histories by pairing the floral patterns of traditional Taiwanese fabrics with fashionable Italian design, and juxtaposing them against the stark military imagery of Afghan war rugs. Lin’s motifs reflect his interest in global culture, both popular and obscure. As Hou Hanru notes: “Michael Lin’s motives are borrowed from the folk craft textiles marginalized by the Capitalist consumer society […] it’s not an indifferent fact that Michael Lin comes from Taiwan, a historically and geo-politically in-between land— an in-between island with its typical hybrid culture.”5
4 Moroso was founded in 1952 and for the past 15 years, the company’s artistic direction has been the work of Patrizia Moroso. Located in Udine in northern Italy, Moroso is one of the leading Italian companies in the field of upscale furniture and specializes in producing sofas, armchairs and seats. The company works closely with a number of leading contemporary designers, including Ron Arad, Tom Dixon, Konstantin Grcic, Alfredo Häberli, Toshiyuki Kita, Javier Mariscal, Marc Newson and Patrizia Urquiola.
5 Hou, Hanru, “What about sleeping in a show? – Michael Lin’s Artistic Intervention,” in ARS 01, Kiasma Museum, 2001, Helsinki, Finland, p. 143.
top to bottom:
Spring 2003, 2003, work in progress, Moroso, Milan, Italy.
Spring 2003, 2003, Moroso, Milan, Italy.
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Traditional Taiwanese patterns circulate throughout Lin’s works, becoming hybridized along the way, much like products and styles that are processed in the global market. Lin’s trademark floral designs originated on bolts of fabric. Lin used these designs in his Complimentary exhibition on pillows made for the day bed. He then made paintings of the pillows, which hung on the gallery wall. The pattern then became a large-scale floor painting, only to return to fabric form, produced in Europe and used to upholster furniture in Spring 2003. By upholstering high-end furniture designs in vernacular patterns, Lin plunges the viewer into the cultural confluence of craft and fine art, Eastern and Western visual language. Notions of nationalist identity dissipate through commodification. The cultural elitism that dismisses the “Made in Taiwan” label is destabilized. The label now reads Taiwan, but also Italy, Afghanistan, Paris, and Japan.
As one settles in Lin’s “living room,” the contradictory nature of the ominous imagery on the carpet becomes apparent. The floor is painted in somber tones of red, khaki green, blue, and black that faithfully correspond to war rugs woven by Afghani refugee craftsmen in Pakistan during the ten years of Soviet military presence (1979-1989). These artists replaced traditional Afghani floral motifs with stylized versions of weapons used in the conflict (grenades, tanks, helicopters and AK-47s), thus conflating the abstract, the decorative, and the deadly. The production and distribution of these rugs was a way of circulating a political protest throughout global culture. At the same time that Western artists were challenging the commodification of art in a desire to better communicate with the audience, Afghani artisans were selling “war rugs” in Pakistan to communicate the social and cultural
injustices they had experienced. Lin appropriates the designs of the most common, highly sought-after of these rugs, in order to signal their commodity status.
Spring 2003 was originally produced for an exhibition at the furniture fair in Milan at the Moroso showroom in April 2003. Exhibited in the Palais’ common space, it became a natural destination for hanging out. The work was made in response to the world events that erupted in the spring of 2003, and the occupation symbolized in the painted floor took on new meaning as a different type of occupation was taking place in Afghanistan. Distanced from the actual site of hostility, this stable setting restricts chaos. Far from being an activist, Lin’s strategy in addressing conflict is more aligned with pacifists’ motivations. Lin’s proposition invites a peaceful ritual exchange as he asks us to sit back, take a break, and reflect.
The Moroso furniture covered with Lin’s stylized flower patterns is arranged salon-style, with the chaise lounge Lowseat and two Fjord Relax armchairs designed by Patricia Urquiola; the chair Take a Line for a Walk by Alfredo Häberli; Soft Little Heavy, Soft Big Heavy and the sofa Victoria designed by Ron Arad; all softly lit by a hallmark of 1950s modern design, a giant Noguchi paper lantern. Two Springfield tables hold arrangements of fresh flowers that are cared for daily and changed weekly by museum gallery assistants. With a nod to designs of the 1950s and 1970s, Spring 2003 forges a bond between the formal lines of the furniture and its function of relaxation. Like the artists Jorge Pardo, Andrea Zittel, and Tobias Rehberger, among others, Lin works to alter the functions of specific spaces through aesthetic design. Lin proposes a relaxed atmosphere for exchange, as preferable to zones of discomfort.
Just as the presence of human beings makes Chinese artist Cai Guo-Qiang’s work so powerful, verging on cathartic, the presence of people also completes Lin’s work—not in the same healing manner as Cai’s, but in a contemplative way, by allowing a simple coming together for engagement and exchange to occur.6 Within our hyper-cyber culture, which often precludes meaningful human interaction, Lin longs for the salon, the forum, and the chance rendezvous (across hybridized cultural lines) to impart notions of a greater community. This desire
6 This relates to Cia Guo-Qiang’s interest in fusing East and West, as in his Cultural Melting Bath: Projects for the 20th Century, first installed at Queens Museum of Art, 1997, wherein visitors were invited to hop into a therapeutic and medicinal hot tub among an atmosphere of clustered Chinese rocks, becoming part of a literal and metaphorical cultural melting pot.
Postcard invitation: Michael Ming Hong Lin Solo Exhibition “HERE,” July 31-August 21, 1999, IT Park Gallery, Taipei, Taiwan.
is increasingly relevant in the present the global climate, as East and West struggle to maintain a balance that is capricious at best.
Completing Spring 2003 is Unlimited, the wallpaper lining the walls of the installation. Designed by the artist, Unlimited, 2003 is a piece within a piece and consists of large posters that can be fitted together side by side, providing the opportunity for people to reconfigure the artist’s floral motifs to infinity. This idea first emerged in Lin’s work in a 1999 project, Untitled Cigarette Break. Long interested in the in-between spaces, Lin selected a hallway outside the main exhibition space of IT Park Gallery in Taipei. For this piece he arranged two Le Corbusier chairs upholstered in floral fabric in the hallway, hung five large paintings of the floral fabric on the wall that corresponded to the five cushions that make up the Le Corbusier chairs, and a white cube. Finally, he placed a standing ashtray between the chairs. Lin thus transformed a non-space aesthetically, formalizing its function as a space for taking cigarette breaks and allowing the viewers/users to reorder the space at will. In Unlimited 2003, the patterned paper is both a Michael Lin artwork in its own right and a playful, interactive object for those who acquire it. Unlimited 2003 initiates an unlimited exchange, making it possible to re-edit the piece indefinitely. Just as he “advertised” his motif on a billboard, Lin extends the economy of cultural motifs and trades tradition for contemporaneity.
Spring 2003 derives its poignancy from the juxtaposition of politics and design and of leisure and discomfort. This invitation to sit and contemplate creates a link between the craft-based vintage war rugs and modern design. Within a realm of decorative escape and the beautiful, the viewer is subtly directed to the tension of the world, where the question of otherness emerges along with the discomfort of a foreign, distanced place. By delivering momentary serenity and a space to reflect, Michael Lin heightens the awareness of the instability that creates war, now and then, reminding us that the comforts of this moment are temporal and certainly not universal.
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In Sickness and In Health (exterior view), 2004, Contemporary Art Museum St. Louis. Photograph: Jay Fram.
In Sickness and In Health
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In Sickness and In Health, 2004, Contemporary Art Museum St. Louis. Photograph: Jay Fram.
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In Sickness and In Health, 2004, Contemporary Art Museum St. Louis. Photograph: Bruce Burton.
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In Sickness and In Health, 2004, Contemporary Art Museum St. Louis. Photograph: Jay Fram.
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In Sickness and In Health (detail), 2004, Contemporary Art Museum St. Louis. Photograph: Michael Lin.
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In Sickness and In Health (detail), 2004, Contemporary Art Museum St. Louis. Photograph: Jay Fram.
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In Sickness and In Health (wedding), 2004, Contemporary Art Museum St. Louis.Photograph: Suzy Gorman.
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In Sickness and In Health (Bride and Groom), 2004, Contemporary Art Museum St. Louis. Photograph: Suzy Gorman.
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Spring 2003, 2004, installation view at the Contemporary Art Museum St. Louis.
Spring 2003
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Spring 2003, 2004, installation view at the Contemporary Art Museum St. Louis. Photograph: Bruce Burton.
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Spring 2003, 2004, installation view at the Contemporary Art Museum St. Louis. Photograph: Bruce Burton.
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Spring 2003, 2003, installation view, Palais de Tokyo, Paris, France.
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Spring 2003, 2003, installation view, Palais de Tokyo, Paris, France.
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Unlimited, 2003, poster/wallpaper, dimensions variable. Produced by Palais de Tokyo, Paris, Galerie Tanit, Munich, and Moroso, Udine, Italy. Palais de Tokyo, Paris, France.
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Spring 2003 (detail), 2003, Moroso, Milan, Italy.
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Palais de Tokyo 22.01-22.8.2002, 2002, emulsion on wood, 91’ x 29’ 3”, Palais de Tokyo, Paris, France.
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Kiasma Day Bed (detail), 2001, emulsion on wood, 11’ 7” x 11’ 7” x 1” 4”, Kiasma Museum, Helsinki, Finland.
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Kiasma Day Bed, 2001, emulsion on wood, 11’ 7” x 11’ 7” x 1” 4”, Kiasma Museum, Helsinki, Finland.
The Architect & The HousewifeFrances Stark
In Los Angeles, in the spring, at a table, on the beach, Michael Lin told me about his last project, Interior, and showed me his plans for Complementary. We spoke of his interests in pursuing a dialogue between the public space of the exhibition and the private space of the domestic interior. He told me the project, Complementary, was to culminate in book form. If I wanted, I could contribute some text. Then and there I had a heading in my head, a heading in my head not altogether uncomplimentary in and of itself, under which a textual exploration of Complementary might fall. In Taipei, in summer, at a table, under some air conditioning, the heading that was in my head is going from my head now to the paper, towards that aforementioned book, which I have to assume you are now holding, in which case you are also about to encounter below the heading mentioned above, beneath which you will not find an analysis or interpretation of Michael Lin’s Complementary. Instead you’ll find my monologue, my contribution to the dialogue.
But briefly, before I begin, I’m just going to pull a quote from a book I found lying on Michael Lin’s desk. The book is by Oscar Wilde and it’s called The Critic as Artist. I opened it up because on the cover, in addition to the title, it said: with some remarks on the importance of doing nothing and discussing everything, and my eyes landed on the following sentence: “If you wish to understand others you must intensify your own individualism.”
The Architect & The Housewife
I have had complaints about my couch, which bisects my living room diagonally, orienting the viewer towards a rather delightful view overlooking the city and its backdrop of hills, behind which the sun can be seen disappearing nightly. Although not lacking a handful of admirers, the couch seems to provide inadequate comfort to most visitors, either they say so directly, or more often express their discomfort silently by choosing to make themselves comfortable at
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the kitchen table in the adjoining room, from which you only have a view of purple and pink flowers. The couch is a Danish Modern design, smaller than your average couch, with quite thin square cushions, extremely attractive actually. However, I don’t think the design is the problem. The problem, rather, lies in the fact that directly behind the couch, meaning directly behind the head of anyone sitting on the couch, is my desk. It’s technically just a table, a long one, slightly longer than the couch and only an inch or so taller than the top of the couch. The large rectangular surface of the desk is covered in that dark chocolaty brown, fake wood veneer. Its edges are curved, lined with dark brown plastic trim about an inch thick. Its base, collapsible if necessary, is made of thin, cheap metal, painted, of course, dark brown. Usually the entire surface of the desk is covered—my computer, loose papers, books and stacks of this and that. So, not only is it just a desk behind the seated person’s head, but an unruly mess made up of stacks of loose papers that can and do easily stray from the boundary of the table-desk toward the head and shoulders of a seated guest. It’s a mess because it lacks any of the simple and ingenious design conveniences which might usually be incorporated into a well-made desk in order to keep papers and various other desk-dwelling items under control. I failed to mention that the table-desk lies flush with the back of the couch diagonally bisecting my living room in order to leave all possible wall space open. I use the desk for writing and the walls for making drawings, which I may as well tell you, are made up of writing. So you see this curious arrangement (of my couch and my desk, not my writing and my writing-drawing) is predicated on the fact that not only is my living room my living room but my living room also serves as my studio.
The dilemma of having a couch in my studio is perhaps an interesting one. If I can’t get sufficiently engaged in a book, or making a drawing I might end up staring into space. You can’t stare into space forever, so I might start to look around and begin thinking to myself, this house is too messy or not nice looking enough or those drawers should be cleaned out or perhaps if I got a different piece of furniture for over there I could rearrange this here and my life would run more smoothly. I am sparing you the details of my toil, which aspires to productivity, suffice it to say it is not hard not to experience, on a regular basis, the loneliness, the anxiety, the nagging urge to “redecorate” I imagine a housewife might feel.
The possibility of becoming an active consumer can drive me out of the house—once entering Ikea,1 or even Office Depot— wherever—the world opens up in terms of what me and my home, office, studio can
1 Possibly traceable back to the Larsson’s, a big influence in Swedish design movements. See “The Ideal Swedish Home: Carl Larsson’s Lilla Hyttnas” by Michelle Facos in Not at Home: The Suppression of Domesticity in Modern Art and Architecture, edited by Chirstopher Reed. (Thames & Hudson, London, 1996).
become. On two separate occasions I bought a pillow from a chain store called The Pottery Barn. Both times I resented the homogeny of the store, but both times I thought to myself “My head deserves the luxury this pillow has to offer.” The first pillow purchase actually can be broken down into two parts. Part one is I simply bought a pillow without a case at Ikea, the first throw pillow I ever bought in my life, by the way. In the do-it-yourself spirit of Ikea, I planned to sew my own case out of something special. I don’t really sew, but it seemed simple enough. Several weeks passed without me sewing a case. One day my father and baby brother drove into town. We planned to drive to the museum where one of my drawings happened to be hanging in an exhibition. We got in the car to go there but first we needed to eat. In our search for a meal we could all agree on we got completely off track and far from the museum. By the time we finished eating it was quite late and we were running out of time, and because adult things are harder to do with a six year old in tow, we ended up at the mall across the street instead of the museum. That is where the first shop that sucked me in spit me back out again with a baby blue angora pillowcase. That was part two of pillow purchase number one. Pillow purchase number two is like this. I was feeling heartbroken and unable to work. My friend Laura, a painter, learned of my useless condition and decided I needed escape. She drove me to a heavily populated shopping area. We walked into a series of stores that sold housewares and took turns interpreting the merchandise. We ended up at The Pottery Barn and she bought a variety of blue floral pillows in different sizes whereas I selected a large summery two-tone Green silk. But this second trip to The Pottery Barn, with another woman artist instead of my father, coincided with the moment at which I recognized there was a novice homemaker-cum-consumer in me that was eager to get out and find a rug, an inoffensively scented candle, or a pillow at precisely the time I should be sitting at the chocolaty, fake wood table pushing through a difficult piece of work.
The kind of anxiety associated with working alone in a domestic environment is precisely what brought the housewife to mind. I have sometimes found myself envying a male friend, here or there, who happened to be engaged in large-scale art projects, out in the open air, or inside institutions with many people running around to ensure an imminent production. Was I not unlike a housewife, toiling within the confines of my home and serving as both
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hostess and docent of my tiny quarters? Were these men notunlike architects in that they were constantly carrying out plans—giving instructions, making constructions?
The impetus behind these categorizations had a little bit to do with the idea of couples. I knew of some couples in the art world where the female part of the couple happened to be engaged in works that were more studio oriented, in that they were either paintings or some other type of practice which typically has to be carried out alone in the s avant-garde. Maybe, maybe not. I can imagine The Architect and The Housewife as a heading over almost any discussion regarding post-studio art practices which focus on decorative and design issues, whether in a public or private space. I can imagine its applicability to those works which seek to examine or at least evoke modernism’s failures or successes, its utopian designs-for-living, or to those works which rely heavily on a public setting or large quantities of institutional commerce to bring the final product, object, and/or site into being, and last but not least those practices which seemingly overlook their complex reliance on the architecture and structure of the “art world,” still insisting that the hand-made portable object is capable of producing meaning within its limited frame.
But first, back to basics. I presume a housewife is someone who will stay and maintain the home, decorate, arrange, re-arrange, prepare, wash, put things away, bring them out again— the house not being a site of accumulating production but a site of series of simultaneous productions which bear no evidence of productivity—save for the fact that the home isn’t falling apart. A supposedly good housewife maintains a busy environment which should appear as if nothing has ever happened. Nothing is being built per se. The architect, on the other hand, solves problems the public doesn’t think about but which affect their consciousness of the environment, from things as essential as material, lighting and scale to more socially articulated needs like safety, cost, codes, et cetera.
The exteriority I have so far mentally ascribed to “the architect” has to do with elaborate extensions, disruptions and transformationsinto and of material reality. And, by extension, the act of writing,with a special emphasis on fiction, seems to demand very little in terms of outside space—no commerce, a budget of mostlyjust living expenses, minimal materials—not much of a production. The production doesn’t extend into or employ much of theexterior environment. Publication and distribution are different matters entirely since the formal completion of the work of fiction
Michael’s pillows were tossed underneath the heading“Women’s lives” in one local newspaper.
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does not depend on the realization of either. However in the case of this writing here I wanted to break out of the confines of a personal interior and experience Taiwan. Flying halfway around the world to look at an exhibition and make a short piece of writing, for which I would receive a small payment, is a way for me, personally, to upset my imaginary position in my binary configuration.
Recall the famous piece of writing by Virginia Woolf, A Roomof One’s Own. This text, written in 1928, was meant to addressthe slippery topic of women and fiction. In it she writes: “A woman must have money and a room of her own if she is to write fiction.” Isn’t she suggesting that a main prerequisite to productivity is privacy?A woman, if she is occupying and/or upkeeping everyone else’srooms is going to have a difficult time getting any work done.Sure, she can enjoy many other “rooms,” consuming culture with the best of men, but when it comes to producing culture, it might not only be a question of where she will do it but also a question of where you will consume it.
Think of literature as an interior event, the mind or imagination being the place where the text unfolds. And consider the interior of the head—the particular bodily limits of your own perception and yet the seeming limitlessness of thought. Now think of the interior of a home, to which a housewife has historically been expected to attend. Traditionally it is meant to provide her partner with a restorative and pleasant atmosphere so that he can continue his hardwork in the public sector. Here I am talking about Europeanbourgeois society around the turn of the century at which time something called “Neurasthenia” was a common form of nervous exhaustion thought to be brought about by excessive use of the brain.2 Businessmen were advised to temper their neurasthenia by going home to a completely soothing environment. Patterns found in decorative art objects which adorned the home were meant to offer repose in the domestic setting.
The function of décor is not to arouse particular emotions, but to give the milieu a character in accord with the man who must live there, without compelling his thoughts to focus on the image of a concrete reality, without forcing him to be objective when the hour of subjective refuge awaits him. (From an article entitled “The Interior” from the journal, L’Art decoratif, 1901.)
2 This and the following quote come from the essay “Hi Honey, I’m Home: Weary (Neurasthenic)Businessmen and the Formulation of a Serenely Modern Aesthetic” by Joyce Henri Robinson. This essay can be found in Not at Home.
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Consider now the boundaries of the studio—not a home and not just a room. I came across a particularly striking phrase of Daniel Buren’s in an essay he had written for October magazine in 1971 called “The Function of the Studio.” Here is Buren’s phrase, his heading: “the unspeakable compromise of the portable work of art.” The compromise Buren finds unacceptable is that if a work is produced in a studio it is automatically wedded to that space, it somehow lives perfectly in that space, yet its portability is some kind of breach in integrity, meaning that it compromises itself by having to leave its home and go to a supposedly neutral gallery or museum space. This is at once declaring that a work should completely take into account that the museum or gallery space is nowhere near neutral and that somehow if one denies the work’s relation to its space, one is on some level choosing to ignore the values the museum/gallery architecture are ascribing to the work and the work itself is simply a piece of merchandise that shuttles easily from the studio into the marketplace. By the time I came across this I had already been ruminating on Michael’s pillows. It is interesting how the paintings of the pillows conjure up both the portability of painting as a practice, as well as the portability of the pillows themselves, a major contribution to their use value. Also Complementary exhibits a self-consciousness of its status as exhibition. Not only does its intervention into the architecture offer a better view of outside to its viewers, it allows for more natural light to be shed onto the work, and that view is made available to you now seeing as how the show documented itself. OK, so I have just put the ideology of institutional critique into a convenient nutshell but let’s put scholarship aside for the sake of letting Buren’s “unspeakable compromise” resonate poetically under my compromising heading—granted it’s an extremely subtle poetic. There are a few ways to read the word compromise, one being more drastic than the other. The drastic way, which is surely what he meant, is “to make liable to suspicion, danger or disrepute.” But I also think of a compromise as simply a settling of differences—for instance, something a couple must do to stay a couple. I have learned that the fabric used and reproduced in Complementary is a fabric associated with the wedding night. So, as it turns out, there are couples all over the place here and with a title of a show that means “offsetting mutual lacks” you can bet there’s no way to have a hermetically sealed art discussion, there have to be men, women, unhappiness, happiness, weddings, divorces, and sex. I mean I won’t explicitly discuss these things I just don’t want you to forget about the fact that a home is usually designed for a family which starts with a couple, which is usually made up of two people who at some time
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in their compromising and complementary relationship have rolled around naked together on some pillows or some equivalent thereof. That reminds me of something. Adolf Loos, the Austrian architect, famous for his manifesto against décor, once wrote “All art is erotic.” He didn’t mean it as a compliment. Sure this is seriously taken out of context, but wait.
The architect, R.M. Schindler, also Austrian, designed his own residence in Los Angeles to be occupied by two couples. He seemed to be aspiring to a different kind of domesticity. Each couple would have their own bedroom and places in the house in which they did their work and studies, with several common indoor/outdoor living areas. The house is too complicated to describe here in detail but the pertinent part for our story is that the two couples did not end up occupying the place harmoniously and it ended up just being the home of Schindler and his wife, Pauline. Finally that couple, too, disintegrated. They divided the house and lived there, separately, together. His wife began to hang wallpaper and install carpeting, decorating her part of the house exactly the way she wanted, and here I might add that pink was her favorite color. Her husband would draft her letters which went something along the lines of “I am sure you are familiar with the reasoning for my choice of materials and that what you have done is completely incongruent with my design and destroys the integrity of the structure,” something along those lines, “signed, R.M. Schindler, Architect.” So much for compromise.
Famous architects throughout history have also been known to design chairs. Adolf Loos, Le Corbusier, Mies van der Rohe, Eero Saarinen, Frank Gehry and so on, even Schindler. The specificity of the challenge lies in the intimacy with which a body is to interact with a chair, an intimacy far greater and literally more pressing than between a body and a building. Here there is a direct correlation with contemporary artists’ desire to address private individual comfort from the standpoint of an extremely public and social oriented tradition. Domesticity, interior design, and private vs. public space surface as issues in the works of many young contemporary, internationally renowned artists (which might be squeezed into the “architect” category), artists whose practices are in line with Daniel Buren’s oppositional ideology. In a lot of instances the work directly involves seating: the upholstering of chairs; a pier on which to venture out, buy a pack of cigarettes, smoke and enjoy the view; a private island, the transformation of a public Donald Judd sculpture into a bench at which to sit with friends, drink alcohol and listen to music; a building turned into a lamp with a rug laid out in front of it.
Some of these projects were taken from The Sculpture Projects , 1997, which culminated in a five-hundred and forty page catalogue of the exhibition. Interestingly enough, Daniel Buren not only participated in the project but contributed a manifesto-like text to the catalogue. I was reclining on a rug under a lamp next to a stack of art catalogues at Michael’s house leafing through this gigantic catalogue thinking about how despite the fact that Buren’s critique of the portable object is now pretty much the dominant ideology, there surely is no shortage of the most portable object of all time, the book, and here I refer specifically to the art catalogue, which ensures that a work—no matter how problematic or ephemeral, no matter how casual or whimsical— remains a work of art, and a portable one at that.
Another book I happened to find at Michael’s house, aside from the Oscar Wilde one, is The Sense of Order: A Study in the Psychology of Decorative Art by E.H.Gombrich. This book is so great I’m sadto have to go back to L.A. without it. Several days after picking up Wilde’s The Artist as Critic (which sort of gave me the go-aheadto be myself, so to speak) I started reading the Gombrich book.I couldn’t believe its pertinence. Just that day I had come so close to buying a different book by Gombrich, my first one by the way, as with the Ikea throw pillow, but I decided, it’ll be cheaper in the States. And now here was Gombrich again, this time tempting me to justcopy half of his book by hand and put it in the catalogue insteadof my own writing. And not only that. Right at a critical point where designers were considering themselves equals with painters, he quotes The Critic as Artist (auspicious or what?):
The art that is frankly decorative is the art to live with. It is, for all visible arts, the one art that creates in us both mood and temperament. Mere colour, unspoiled by meaning, and unallied with definite form, can speak to the soul in a thousand different ways. The harmony that resides in the delicate proportions of lines and masses becomes mirrored in the mind. The repetitions of patterns give us rest.
Now bear with me, I am about to put that Loos business about all art being erotic into context for you. According to Gombrich “the emancipation of pattern design into a dependent art with growing pretensions foreshadowed the divorce between decoration and functional fitness.” He quotes Loos, who vehemently requests the divorce from his 1908 essay Ornament und Verbrechen. But before that he briefly points out that as early as 1892 the American architect, Louis Sullivan, had written: “it would be greatly for our aesthetic good if we should refrain entirely from the use of ornament for a period of
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years in order that our thoughts might concentrate acutely upon the production of buildings well formed and comely in the nude.” Here it sounds like Sullivan is only calling for a friendly separation instead of a divorce. And I know with Sullivan they get back together, and I know this because I know Sullivan was obsessed with decoration until his very old age because in fact I happen to have a tattoo of one of the drawings he made after he had stopped making buildings. So, you can imagine my excitement when I first read those few sentences heretofore left out from in front of “All art is erotic.” “The man of this century who tattoos himself is a criminal or a degenerate…The urge to ornament one’s face and everything within reach is the very origin of the visual arts. It is the babbling of painting.”3 And speaking of babbling, I have babbled on long enough but I’d like to bring this full circle if I can, and bring your attention now to an image of a perfect couple, a perfect marriage, where the gesture of placing a pillow in just the right spot has made history.
“[Drawing reproduced to the left] shows three pillows of the same size placed on top of each other, on a rug, on the floor, offering contrasts in color and tone. At other times, more pillows were used and the grouping was placed slightly differently on the rug and in relation to the other objects. On the Sofa Compact in the late 1960s and for much of the 1970s, two patchwork pillows complemented each other and contrasted with a larger striped one.”4
All drawings by Frances Stark.
3 According to Gombrich abstraction in painting didn’t occur until after this complicated and competitive intermingling of decorative art with high art.
4 Pat Kirkham, Charles and Ray Eames: Designers of the Twentieth Century. Massachusetts Institute of Technology, 1995, pp. 188-189.
Grind, 2004, emulsion on wood, installation view at PS1 Contemporary Art Center, Long Island City, New York.
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Select Installations
Grind (detail), 2004, emulsion on wood, PS1 Contemporary Art Center, Long Island City, New York.
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Garden Passage, 2003, emulsion on wall, NMAC Foundation, Cadiz, Spain.
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Garden Passage, 2003, emulsion on wall, NMAC Foundation, Cadiz, Spain.
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50
ICA 27.05-26.08.2001, 2001, emulsion on wall, 45’ 6” x 13,’ ICA Taipei, Taipei, Taiwan.
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Prigioni 10.06-04.11.2001, 2001, emulsion on wood, 43’ 9” x 23’ 10” x 1’ 3,” Taiwan Pavilion, Venice, Italy.
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Atrium Stadius Den Haag 12.07-08.09.2002, 2002, emulsion on wood, 162’ 6” x 81’ 3,” City Hall, The Hague, the Netherlands.
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Atrium Stadius Den Haag 12.07-08.09.2002 (detail), 2002, emulsion on wood, 162’ 6” x 81’ 3,” City Hall, The Hague, the Netherlands.
TFAM 08.09.2000-07.01.2001, 2000, emulsion on wood, 117’ x 52,’ Taipei Fine Art Museum, Taipei, Taiwan.
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Platform, 2001, emulsion on wood, 52’ x 32’ 6” x 1’ 3,” Istanbul Biennial, Istanbul, Turkey.
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Guild Room 27.10.2001-20.01.2002, 2001, emulsion on wood, 16’ 3” x 29’ 3,” SMAK, Gent, Belgium.
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Palais des Beaux Arts 06.12.2003-22.02.2004, 2003, emulsion on wood 104’ X 65,’ Flower Power, Palais des Beaux Arts, Lille, France.
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left: House, 1998, emulsion wall painting, 29’ 3” x 16’ 3,” Bamboo Curtain Studio, Taipei, Taiwan.
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Untitled, 2003, emulsion on wall, 9’ 9” x 8’ 1”. Galerie Urs Meile, Luzern, Switzerland.
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Michael LinBorn 1964, Tokyo, Japan.
Lives and works in Paris, France & Taipei, Taiwan.
EDUCATION:
1992-93 M.F.A. Art Center College of Design, Pasadena, California, USA.
SELECTED SOLO EXHIBITIONS:
2004 PS1 Contemporary Art Center-Long Island City, New York, USA.
2003 Palais de Tokyo-Site de Creation Contemporaine, Paris, France.
Moroso Showroom, Milan, Italy.
Galerie Urs Meile, Lucerne, Switzerland.
2002 Galerie Tanit, Munich, Germany.
Stroom, The Hague, the Netherlands.
Galerie Ghislaine Hussenot, Paris, France.
Palais de Tokyo-Site de Creation Contemporaine, Paris, France.
2000 Artstyl.com, Paris, France.
1999 IT Park Gallery, Taipei, Taiwan.
1998 Dimensions Endowment of Art, Taipei, Taiwan.
1996 IT Park Gallery, Taipei, Taiwan.
1994 IT Park Gallery, Taipei, Taiwan.
SELECTED GROUP EXHIBITIONS:
2003 Flower Power/Lille 2004, Palais des Beaux Arts, Lille, France.
The Fifth System, Shenzhen, China.
Tiger’s Eye, Proud Gallery, London, UK.
Painting 4, The Rose Art Museum of Brandeis University, Waltham, Massachusetts, USA.
Crossed, CCCB, Barcelona, Spain.
NMAC Foundation, Cadiz, Spain.
Chinese Contemporary Art/Subversion and Poetry, Culturgest- Lisbon, Portugal.
Bibliotherapy (with Remy Markowitsch), Kuntsmuseum-Luzern, Switzerland.
2002 Urgent Painting, Musee d’Art Moderne de la Ville de Paris, Paris, France.
Asianvibe, Espai d’Art Contemporani de Castello (EACC), Castello, Spain.
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Pause_Gwangju Biennial, Gwangju Biennial Hall, Gwangju, Korea.
Synthetic, Galerie Zurcher, Paris, France.
How Big Is The World?, O.K.Centrum für Gegenwartskunst, Linz, Austria.
Asian Art Triennial, Queensland Art Gallery, Brisbane, Australia.
International 2002, Liverpool Biennial, Liverpool, UK.
The Gravity of the Immaterial, Total Museum, Seoul, Korea.
2001 The Gravity of the Immaterial, Institute of Contemporary Art, Taipei, Taiwan.
49th Biennial of Venice, Taiwan Pavilion, Venice, Italy.
7th Istanbul Biennial, Istanbul, Turkey.
ARS O1, Kiasma Museum, Helsinki, Finland.
Casino 2001, SMAK, Ghent, Belgium.
Bibliotherapy (with Remy Markowitsch), Villa Merkel, Esslingen, Germany.
2000 The Sky is the Limit, 2000 Taipei Biennial, Taipei Fine Arts Museum, Taiwan.
Sister Space Project, Southern Exposure, San Francisco, California, USA.
Very Fun Park, Hong Kong Art Center, Hong Kong.
Festival of Vision /Berlin in Hong Kong, Tamar Site, Hong Kong.
1999 Visions of Pluralism, China Art Museum, Beijing, China.
Magnetic Writing/Marching Ideas, IT Park Gallery, Taipei, Taiwan.
Fukuoka Triennale, Fukuoka Asian Art Museum, Fukuoka, Japan.
KHOJ, International Artist Workshop, Modinagar, India.
1998 Tu Pales/J’ecoute, Taipei Fine Arts Museum, Taipei, Taiwan.
Back from Home, The Bamboo Curtain Studio, Taipei, Taiwan.
Tu Pales/J’ecoute, La Ferme du Buisson, Paris, France.
1997 IT Park Group Exhibition, Taipei Fine Arts Museum, Taipei, Taiwan.
Allegory and Simulacra, Gallery Pierre, Taichung, Taiwan.
1996 Perimeter 4, Gallery 456, New York, New York, USA.
1995 Transitional Site, IT Park Gallery, Taipei, Taiwan.
1994 Post Marshall Law, Gate Gallery, Taipei, Taiwan.
Art & Text, National Normal College, Taipei, Taiwan.
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Facing pages: In Sickness and In Health (installation views), 2004. Contemporary Art Museum St. Louis. Photographs: Michael Lin.
Selected Bibliography
Bourne, Cecile. “Reviews: Taipei (Taiwan), Michael Lin, IT Park.” Flash Art, Vol. 30, no.194 (May-June 1997): 124.
Bourne, Cecile. Tu Parles/J’ecoute. Taipei: Taipei Fine Arts Museum; 1998.
Casavecchia, Barbara. “Taipei Biennial.” Flash Art, Vol. 33, no. 215 (November-December 2000): 103.
Davenport, Rhana. Asia Pacific Triennial. Queensland: Queensland Art Gallery; 2002.
Davenport, Rhana. “The Sky is the limit.” Art Asia Pacific, no. 30 (2001): 20-2.
Hou, Hanru. ARS 01. Kiasma: Kiasma Museum; 2001.
Hou, Hanru. Asianvibe. Castello: Espai d’Art Contemporani de Castello; 2002.
Hsu, Manray. Urgent Painting. Paris: Musee d’Art Moderne de la Ville de Paris; 2002.
Kao, Chien-hui. Living Cell. Venice: Venice Biennial, Taiwan Pavilion; 2001.
Lloyd, Ann Wilson. “Reorienting: Japan Rediscovers Asia.” Art in America, Vol. 87, no. 10 (October 1999): 104-11.
Mahoney, Bronwyn. Egofugal. Istanbul: Istanbul Biennial; 2001.
Mahoney, Bronwyn. “Patterns of Thought: The Installation of Michael Lin.” Yishu- Journal of Contemporary Chinese Art (Spring 2003): 82-85.
Mcintyre, Sophie and Chia Chi Jason Wang. “Taipei in entropy.” Flash Art, Vol. 29, no.187 (March-April 1996): 57-60.
ML. “The art of deco.” Art Review, Vol. LIII (February 2002): 50-1.
Rehberg, Vivian and Jerome Sans. Michael Lin. Paris: Palais de Tokyo, site de creation contemporaine, 2002.
Shih, Jui Jen. Fukuoka Asian Art Triennial. Fukuoka: Fukuoka Asian Art Museum; 1999.
Stark, Frances. The Architect and The Housewife, Complimentary. Taipei: Dimension Endowment of Art; 1998.
Tan, Eugene. “Review, Liverpool Biennial, Pleasant Street Board School.” Contemporary, no. 10 (October 2002): 94.
Frances Stark Biography
Frances Stark is a visual artist and writer. Her book, The Architect and the Housewife (Book Works, London) was published in 1999 and more recently she has published Collected Writing: 1993 - 2003 (Book Works, London, 2003), which includes essays on the work of a wide range of innovative contemporary artists, many of them based in Southern California: Allen Ruppersberg, Laura Owens, Bas Jan Ader, Michael Lin, Jorge Pardo, Olafur Eliasson, Raymond Pettibon, and Kevin Hanley. The book also includes catalogue essays written for the Walker Art Center’s Painting at the Edge of the World (2000) and Circles: Socializing, Networking & Peer-Grouping in Contemporary Art (Revolver, Frankfurt, 2003), as well as 9 shorter pieces originally published from 1999 to 2001 in her art/text column “type.” Stark’s also writes fictional prose, poetry, and statements connected to her own visual art practice, some of which are included in these anthologies.
As an artist she has put on some 18 solo gallery exhibitions since 1991 and two solo museum exhibitions, at the UCLA Hammer Museum in Los Angeles (The “Unspeakable” Series, 2002) and the Kunstverein in Munich (“Ich Suche Nach Meine Frances Starke Seite,” 2000). She is represented by the galleries Marc Foxx in Los Angeles, CRG in New York, greengrassi in London, and Galerie Daniel Buchholz in Cologne. Her work can be found in numerous public collections including Los Angeles Museum of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles, Los Angeles County Museum of Art, San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, San Francisco, Museum of Modern Art, New York, the UCLA Hammer Museum in Los Angeles, and Fonds Regional d’art Contemporain, Champagne-Ardenne in France.
In Sickness and In Health (detail), 2004. Contemporary Art Museum St. Louis. Photograph: Michael Lin.
WORKS IN THE EXHIBITION:
GALLERY A:
In Sickness and In Health, 2004, emulsion on wood, 8 Lambda Duraclear prints, 42.5 x 85 inches, 9 Lambda Duraclear, 41 x 144 inches, two framed photographs, 20 x 30 inches each. Produced by the Contemporary Art Museum St. Louis.
GALLERY B:
Spring 2003, 2003, emulsion on wood, mirror, Noguchi lantern and furniture. Produced by Moroso, Udine, Italy and courtesy the artist, Galerie Tanit, Munich, and Moroso, Udine Italy.
Unlimited, 2003, poster/wallpaper. Produced by Palais de Tokyo, Paris, Galerie Tanit, Munich, and Moroso, Udine, Italy.
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS:
Michael Lin and the Contemporary Art Museum extend their thanks and appreciation to the artists who apprenticed on this project:
Brandon Anschultz, David Bae, Sharon Cox, Neil Enggist, Kelly Furr, Lauren Hermann, Jane Hipple, Jenny Kruger, Reneé Mertz, Jason Miller, Ruth Ogilvie, Nathan Ratcliffe, Mike Schuh, Paul Shank, Riggs Skepnek, Jeff Stewart, Kiersten Torrez, and Sarah Ursini
Special thanks to Cecile Laffonta, Andrew Millner, and Katherine Kuharic at Washington University School of Art.
Montano Grant Events and Florals are the Official Florist of the Michael Lin exhibition.
CONTEMPORARY ART MUSEUM ST. LOUIS BOARD OF DIRECTORS
Susan Sherman, ChairmanClarence C. BarksdaleMark R. BottermanDonald L. Bryant Jr.Bunny BursonJohn CappsReuben O. Charles IIBarbara CookCharles CookDavid M. DienerArnold DonaldBarbara EagletonR. Jeffrey EdwardsAlison FerringJohn FumagalliTerrance GoodJo HarmonJames C. Jamieson IIINancy KranzbergAlan LiebertAnn Sheehan LiptonKimberly MacLeanMarylen MannDonna MoogNeva MoskowitzRuthe PonturoAnn Ruwitch
CONTEMPORARY ART MUSEUM ST. LOUIS STAFFBrandon Anschultz, Exhibitions ManagerBruce Burton, Graphic DesignerAnnie Denny, Development AssociateShannon Fitzgerald, CuratorBrigitte Foley, Annual Fund ManagerAndrea Green, Curatorial AssistantPaul Ha, DirectorSusan Lee, Director, Contemporary Art Partnership (CAP)Mary Walters, Office ManagerKelly Scheffer, Director of Education and OutreachMichael Schuh, RegistrarSarah Ursini, Visitor Services CoordinatorSusan Werremeyer, Director of Development and Communications
Carlin ScanlanPat SchuchardWilliam ShearburnMichael StaenbergDonald M. SuggsAnabeth WeilDonna Wilkinson
EMERITUS
Eleanor W. DewaldJoan GoodsonTony Havlin, ex-officioMeredith Holbrook, ex-officioVincent C. Schoemehl Jr., ex-officio
Colophon
This Book was designed by Bruce Burton on a MacIntosh G5 in Adobe Indesign. The typeface is Tarzana Narrow and Tarzana Wide designed by Zuzana Licko in 1998. These two families of sans-serif text faces were developed purely along formal lines. The goal was to balance the neutrality required for a text face with just enough idiosyncrasies to create a slightly unfamiliar design in order to provide new interest. Tarzana is distributed through Emigre, a digital type foundry, publisher and distributor of graphic design related software and printed materials based in Northern California.
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