Lin Tianmiao - Artist

Bound Unbound

7 September 2012 - 27 January 2013

"One of Lin Tianmiao’s clearest recollections of her childhood in China was helping her mother sew clothes for the family. When she returned to China after spending eight years living in New York, she was inspired by this memory to create a technique she calls thread winding, where she winds silk or cotton thread around an object until it is completely covered and ultimately transformed. She used this in one of her first major works calledThe Proliferation of Thread Winding in 1995, which began her career as an artist and is included in the exhibition. Her use of the technique continues today and can be seen in such recent works as All the Same.

Lin Tianmiao’s paintings, sculptures, and installations have always been about a series of dual tensions. These are frequently played out in her works through contrasts between materials, but they are also evident in binary themes such as male versus female, function versus form, and physical versus psychological experience. Underlying all of these themes is a keen exploration of a physical experience, at times emphasizing the female body. We see this in the works Chatting and Mothers!!!.

Lin is one of only a handful of women artists of her generation born in the 1960s to have emerged during the 1990s when the Chinese art world was coming of age and gaining substantial international recognition. Her works over the past twenty years are as much about her personal journey as an artist as they are about a desire to articulate broader social issues. Through her focus on a female experience, she comments on the enormous social progress made in Chinese society during Mao Zedong’s tenure, yet she hints that some promises remain unfulfilled. Her consistent exploration of these issues, sometimes latent, makes her a significant artist of our time. This exhibition represents Lin Tianmiao’s first major solo exhibition in the United States.

Bound Unbound: Lin Tianmiao is part of Asia Society's yearlong programmatic focus on China, titled China Close Up."

via Asia Society

Exhibit:

725 Park Avenue
New York, NY 10021
+212-288-6400

Houseboat Days

Saying It To Keep It From Happening

Some departure from the norm

Will occur as time grows more open about it.

The consensus gradually changed; nobody

Lies about it any more. Rust dark pouring

Over the body, changing it without decay—

People with too many things on their minds, but we live

In the interstices, between a vacant stare and the ceiling,

Our lives remind us. Finally this is consciousness

And the other livers of it get off at the same stop.

How careless. Yet in the end each of us

Is seen to have traveled the same distance—it’s time

That counts, and how deeply you have invested in it,

Crossing the street of an event, as though coming out of it 

were

The same as making it happen. You’re not sorry,

Of course, especially if this was the way it had to happen,

Yet would like an exacter share, something about time

That only a clock can tell you: how it feels, not what it

means.

It is a long field, and we know only the far end of it,

Not the part we presumably had to go through to get there.

If it isn’t enough, take the idea

Inherent in the day, armloads of wheat and flowers

Lying around flat on handtrucks, if maybe it means more

In pertaining to you, yet what is is what happens in the end

As though you cared. The event combined with

Beams leading up to it for the look of force adapted to the 

wiser

Usages of age, but it’s both there

And not there, like washing or sawdust in the sunlight,

At the back of the mind, where we live now.” 


John Ashbery

a DRAWiNG

Realism in a time of Expressionism: August Sander

Denying tonality as a principle, without formality to replace it. Expressionism. A world phenomena of artists who would go beyond natural appearances to put forward the inner meaning. Expressing elemental feelings rather than a description of the visible world. In contrast to these ideals August Sander who lived from 1876 to 1964 would remain a realist. A portraitist in a time of artistic coercion, documenting every day German life during great tyranny.

Many plates were destroyed under Nazi regime for failing to portray Aryan sensibilities. Some precious negatives and plates would be saved after the war. Therefore, looking at the faces that remain, perhaps one can see beyond the posed figures and into the expression of a climate less conducive of emotion.

When you look into this stunning gelatin silver print you see a young man posing who perhaps, given the way in which he is dressed could be of some social standing. The look in his eyes tell the infinite story.

Sander held a heartfelt fascination with circus people. As one historian puts it, " a suggestive, almost tantalizing narrative unfolds: of freedom and confinement, security and danger, things visible and hidden."

Facial language in a Sander portrait is not only hypnotic it poses a tale of reflection. 

August Sander would go on to influence artists such as, Edward Steichen and Diane Arbus. A collection of August Sander's works can be found in a permanent exhibit at the Getty Center in Los Angeles, California. 


I originally wrote this for Imeem. 

longing to dissolve

I listened to this in a darkened room laying on the floor with my tablet tucked under my chin as the volume pulsed into my chest.

Thanks to Betina

resurrection of a poem fragment

"Of human deeds divine in all but name,

Was it not worth a little hour or more

To add yet this: Once you, a woman, came

To soothe a time-torn man; even though it be

You love not me?" --Thomas Hardy

Sarah Moon

seen in new light

*****contrasted gallery

thanks to Sol who played this with the show giving beautiful light...  

a quote

“If you expect nothing from anybody, you’re never disappointed.”


― Sylvia Plath, The Bell Jar

****contrasted gallery

On Flickr

****contrasted gallery