Lin Tianmiao, Badges, 2011-12

Badges (2011-12). Sherman Foundation Collection.

Part of the “apartment art” generation, Lin Tianmiao is one of the first contemporary Chinese artists to achieve international recognition. She is known for her practice of thread winding in which she binds the material – usually silk, hair, cotton, or felt – tightly around found and manufactured objects. Initially tasked by her mother to spool cotton as a young girl, Lin later reclaimed the act. Lin’s work studies her own social role and the relationship between identity and social context, questioning the identity of woman and the conventional idea of the social role of woman as mother. Best known for her large-scale installations, Lin also works in sculpture, photography, video, and a variety of other media.
"I like to take things to the extreme and find out where their thresholds are. I’m always asking: What is possible? How far can I go with this? What can I say with it? It’s really fun to go against the usual order of things and attempt what’s otherwise impossible through craft."

—Lin Tianmiao
Installation view: Lin Tianmiao: Bound Unbound, Asia Society Museum, New York, 2012.

Solo exhibitions of Lin’s work have been held in China, Europe, and the United States including Systems, Rockbund Museum, Shanghai, China (2018); 1.62M: Lin Tianmiao, How Art Museum, Wenzhou, China (2015); and Bound Unbound, Asia Society Museum, New York City (2013). Her work was also part of Art and China after 1989: Theater of the World at the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum in New York, which travelled to the Guggenheim Bilbao, Spain. She has participated in the Istanbul Biennale, Turkey (1997); Shanghai Biennale, China (2002); Ireland Biennale (2002); Gwangju Biennale, South Korea (2002, 2004); and Setouchi Triennale, Japan (2016). Lin’s work can be found in the public collections of museums including the Brooklyn Museum, New York; Museum of Modern Art, New York; National Gallery of Australia; San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, California; M+, Hong Kong; and Singapore Art Museum.

Lin was born in in 1961 in Taiyuan, China. She now lives and works in Beijing, China.

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Lin Tianmiao, Bound/Unbound series (bicycles), 1996. Installation view: A Window Suddenly Opens: Contemporary Photography in China, Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden, Washington, DC, 2022.
Works

Lin Tianmiao b. 1961

Badges, 2011-12

White silk, colored silk thread, painted stainless steel embroidery frame, sound component
61 pieces: individual diameters of 21.5 inches (55 cm), 31.5 (80 cm), 39.25 inches (100 cm), and 47.25 inches (120 cm)
Installation dimensions at Galerie Lelong: 522 x 374 inches (1325.9 x 950 cm)

© Lin Tianmiao, Courtesy Galerie Lelong & Co., New York

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Exhibitions
Badges, Galerie Lelong, New York, NY, October 25 - December 8, 2012.

Empowerment, Kunstmuseum Wolfsburg, Wolfsburg, Germany, September 10, 2022 to January 8, 2023.

Literature
Motive 23 Art Individuals, Interviews by Shaun Wang, People’s Republic of China, 2014, illustrated p. 76.

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