Published by Contemporary Art Museum St. Louis 3750 Washington Boulevard St. Louis, Missouri 63108 www.contemporarystl.org This publication was prepared on the occasion of the exhibition Michael Lin Organized by Shannon Fitzgerald, Contemporary Art Museum St. Louis.
Curator,
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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 Š 2004 Contemporary Art Museum St. Louis, the authors, and the artist All rights reserved. ISBN 0-9712195-4-0 Library 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 Burton Printed 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.
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Director’s Forward Paul Ha
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Acknowledgments Shannon Fitzgerald
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Confluence Shannon Fitzgerald
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The Architect and The Housewife Frances Stark
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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.
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 Ha Director
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.
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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.
adult docents from the Contemporary Art Partnership, whose dedication and passion for discussing art is becoming quite acclaimed. Thank you!
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.
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.
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.
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 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
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 7
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 Fitzgerald Curator 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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Confluence Shannon 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 sitespecific 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
culture and the disjuncture in that tradition where new meanings and interpretations collide.
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
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 community as a gathering place, to open up the exhibition space, and to 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 itself by way of a language of ornamentation, patterns, screens, and stained 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
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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.
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Taken from the artist’s proposal for this exhibition prepared in October 2003.
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
top to bottom: se remove your , 1996,
Blueprint detail: The Lin Family Manor, Wufeng, Taiwan.
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-21.08.1999,
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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.
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 streetlevel windows with semitransparent 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,
top to bottom:
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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
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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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
Complementary,
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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 of the wedding, and Meschac Gaba, whose own marriage in the Stedelijk 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 less about the artist’s insertion of self into the
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. 18
narrative and traditional institution of marriage than it is about the spaces in which these bonds take place.
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.
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 wall and sweeps the visitor down the flowery aisle to an invisible center or “altar” of the institution of marriage.
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 geopolitically in-between land— an in-between island with its typical hybrid culture.”5
Meanwhile, in downtown St. Louis, a billboard reproducing the exact 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 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.
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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 highend 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.
top to bottom: Spring 2003, 2003, work in progress, Moroso, Milan, Italy. Spring 2003, 2003, Moroso, Milan, Italy.
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 (19791989). These artists replaced traditional Afghani floral motifs with stylized versions of weapons used in the conflict (grenades, tanks, helicopters and AK47s), thus conflating the abstract, the decorative, and the deadly.
Postcard invitation: Michael Ming Hong Lin Solo Exhibition “HERE,” July 31-
Traditional Taiwanese patterns circulate throughout Lin’s works, becoming hybridized along the way, much like products and styles that are processed in the global 20
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.
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 GuoQiang’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
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. 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. 21
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 inbetween 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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