Creating A Universal Language For Engagement in Michael Lin’s “Utah Sky”
Post by Jonathan Odden
"My works create temporary places — not a painting surface but a pedestrian, unremarkable place of respite. I use the term unremarkable for my work, even though they are most of the time monumental in scale, for they recede into the background at the tilt of the head. They are not focus points like a painting or a sculpture... I think that some of the most important works of art are the ones that we live with and that affect our daily lives such as architecture, furniture, and fashion, which can be said to even shape our bodies and minds."
--Michael Lin, in conversation with Gerald Matt
As the Curatorial Assistant of Modern and Contemporary Art, I've been asked to introduce our newest installation: a site-specific work in the High Museum’s Stent Atrium by artist Michael Lin, and to give a bit of introductory information on Lin's work, our rationale behind the commission, as well as suggest a few methods for approaching the work. I hope by way of this brief introduction, I might also make a case for visiting the installation, especially if you have never been to the museum, as the work is only fully understood once interacted with.
Artist Michael Lin. Photograph originally published on the AJC Blog.
Michael Lin is a Taiwanese conceptual artist currently living and working in Shanghai and Brussels. He was born in Japan, raised in California, and returned to Taiwan in 1993 after graduating from the Art Center College of Design, in Pasadena. Much has been written about this pinning to or, rather, unpinning of Michael Lin from various locations, construing him as a wanderer and drawing parallels to the nomadic lifestyle that is, in the words of Annette Tietenberg, "now the red flag of world experience in the contemporary art scene." Although this tendency to view him — and by extension, the larger contemporary art world— as reified globalization is correct, Michael Lin's installations are, by nature of their site-specificity and familiar motifs, of a more intimate scale. They are domestic, accessible, and vernacular. To encounter his work is to be instantly at ease, like traveling a great distance only to find someone who speaks with your accent.
Michael Lin’s “Utah Sky” being installed in the High Museum’s Stent Atrium
Lin began developing his most recognizable style between 1994 and 1996 while working and tending bar at IT Park Gallery in Taipei, which afforded him the opportunity to watch others interact with art leisurely and at ease. "It became clear how important the audience was and the way they interacted with art," Lin explained in a 2008 interview with Jerome Sans. To bring his audience into his space, he began painting floral motifs and patterns lifted from traditional dowry cloths: "They felt at ease to enter the work," explained Lin, "It was something that they were familiar with." His work, then, has primarily become about finding the right language to engage his audience.
In "Utah Sky (Blue Curve)," currently being installed on the floor of the High Museum’s Robinson Atrium, Michael Lin adapts his typically rectangular floor painting to the architectural language of Robert Meyer's original design. The curved shape also speaks directly to the Ellsworth Kelly works in the High Museum’s collection. This effortless merging of his style with that of the space proves inviting: "It’s culturally specific, but at the same time something that we all share," explains Lin.
Though it is not the only reason we approached Michael Lin to propose this collaboration, his practice of social engagement certainly reflects the High’s curatorial mission to highlight work that reaches across and beyond the white-cube of the museum and invites community participation. Michael Rooks, the Wieland family curator of Modern and Contemporary Art, also sees Lin's decision to work with motifs and themes often elided from modern art — the domestic, the ambient, the decorative — along with his use of non-gallery spaces, that is, in Lin's words, "inclusive spaces [that] create an opening," as rich forms of resistance. Through these inclusions, the work resists the reductive divisions that exist between high and low art, eastern and western art, the intellectual and the sensual, the museum and the community.
A group of seven local artists, hired to work with Lin and his studio to produce the work, hand painted the panels for the installation.
The execution of these installations, which frequently spill over floors and wrap entire facades, requires a dedicated team of traveling assistants, local painters, and museum staff. Success comes with the immense time being given by each member of the team; in this way, the community realizes the work together. The production size resembles the "all over" paintings of Abstract Expressionist artists and the industrial painters of the 1960s however, the tone is quite different and affecting. The final pieces are works of sublime beauty given from the artist, from the painters, and from the museum, to the community. The exchange is one freely given. It is an intimate exchange that takes place from hand to hand, because, as curator Ogawa Mitsuyo has noted, "Taiwanese textiles have always been handmade, Lin refuses to adopt mass production methods, and applies paint by hand when producing his art."
For the theoretically inclined reader, the intervention of exchange value is further explored in the writing of Mei-Lin Liu, Annette Tietenberg, and Hou Hanru, all of whom trace Lin’s work against ideas outlined in Derrida's "Given Time I: Counterfeit Money." Embedded in Tietenberg's work is also Deluze's "Nomadic Thoughts," and shades of the Frankfurt school. I also recommend the work of Kim Sunhee and Nanjyo Fumio, both of whom contextualize Michael Lin and East Asian contemporary art in a less western framework. Michael Lin's influences include Daniel Buren, Dan Graham, Franz West, Elaine Scarry, and Taiwanese New Wave Cinema.
I would like to end by thanking only the smallest fraction of the many people whose vital expertise and time have gone into this project. First, I would like to thank Michael E. Shapiro, our director, for inviting us to rethink some of the museum’s most used and iconic spaces. I would also like to thank Michael Rooks for the opportunity to work on this project and his trust in me throughout. I would also like to thank Leslie Petsoff, our exhibition coordinator, who has really been the driving force behind this project and is the person responsible for the amazing final product. Thank you!
