Lin Tianmiao

Lin Tianmiao (; born 1961) is a contemporary Chinese installation artist and textile designer. She sometimes makes use of everyday objects.

Life

Lin Tianmiao was born in 1961 in Taiyuan, Shanxi province, China. Her father was an ink painter and master calligrapher and her mother studied and taught traditional dance.

She lived in Brooklyn from 1988

Work

Lin started her career as a textile designer and used the skills she had learned in her later work. She changed from textile design to art because she felt like design was limiting her creativity and suppressing her expression. Lin and her husband participated in the Beijing Young Artists' Painting Society, which was contiguous with the '85 Art New Wave Movement. In 2012, she made a series of works using a wooden frame, threads and synthetic bones; Minty Blue (2012) and Duckling Yellow (2012) were two works in the series. She had a 2006 residency at the Singapore Tyler Print Institute where she experimented with paper media and printmaking. Since the mid-1990s, her works have been included in every major international museum show on Chinese contemporary art.

In 2017, her show at Galerie Lelong in New York exhibited her work Protruding Patterns (2014), which encouraged visitors to walk over her work - an installation made entirely of antique carpets. The carpets were embroidered with dozens of words about women in Chinese, English, French and other tongues - a selection of approximately 2,000 phrases she had collected over a period of more than five years.

Feminist themes

Lin's work often deals with themes traditionally applicable to women. With its focus on the manifestations of domesticity and motherhood, critics have compared her work to Western feminist art, she has rejected that characterization.

“My art is an expression of my life, as an artist, as a Chinese, and I suppose, as a woman,” she responded to the art world’s routine characterization of her as a “Chinese woman artist.”¹ She uncouples these terms as a reminder to art critics and art historians that her work transcends such an essentializing label. She views that the label feminisim restricts the interpretation of her works, and how she thinks about them.