This review is scripted in English. It was published in  Asia-Pacific Sculpture News  in Spring issue, 1995. (Jerry Wu\u2723).https://digital.kenyon.edu/zhoudocs/1159/thumbnail.jp

LIN 林天苗, Tian-miao

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Digital Kenyon: Research, Scholarship, and Creative Exchange Zhou Documents Spring 1995 Review: LIN TianMiao's "New Works" Exhibition Tian-miao LIN 林天苗 Follow this and additional works at: https://digital.kenyon.edu/zhoudocs Recommended Citation LIN 林天苗, Tian-miao, "Review: LIN TianMiao's "New Works" Exhibition" (1995). Zhou Documents. 156. https://digital.kenyon.edu/zhoudocs/156 This Review is brought to you for free and open access by Digital Kenyon: Research, Scholarship, and Creative Exchange. It has been accepted for inclusion in Zhou Documents by an authorized administrator of Digital Kenyon: Research, Scholarship, and Creative Exchange. For more information, please contact noltj@kenyon.edu. BeijingLin TianmiaoNew Works was Lin'sfirst exhibition inBeijing and it wassmall. She presented only twopieces, The Proliferation ofThread Winding and The Temp-tation of St. Theresa, each al-luding to similar themes:women. To say that her instal-lations explored the nature ofwomen raises the thorny ques-tion of this nature being oneinherent to women. or one thatsociety imposes upon its fe-male half, the objects she usedbeing entirely synonymous withwomen. It is a question thatLin's work served to highlight,but did not seek to answer.The Proliferation ofThread Winding comprised asimple iron-bed frame. spreadwith a mattress, and a pillow atthe head. The usual cotton cov-ers for both pillow and mat-tress were replaced with thosemade from rice paper. Eachcover was hand-sewn but heldfirmer at the edges with a lineof five-inch needles. A videomonitor was set into the pillowand relayed the mesmerizing,looped image of female handsengaged in winding string intoballs of thread. The pinkness ofthe hands provided the onlyhint of color in the piece. Thefilmed motion captured whatwas the greater part of thepreparatory work; the windingof approximately 2,000 ping-pong-sized balls of string.In The Proliferation ofThread Winding, these ballslay on the ground at the foot ofthe bed, spread out like a man-tle of hair. The loose end ofeach ball was threaded throughthe eye of a needle; two thou-sand needles ranged in a densenest of more than 20,000 indi-vidually placed in the uppersurface of the paper mattresscover. This mass effected a loosereference to the female sexualorgan yet this was not a con-sciously preconceived arrange-ment.The main elements ofLins work revolve around aSPRING 1995EXHIBITIONREVIEWScontrast ~een hard (male/yang) and soft (female/yin),here represented by steel nee-dles on a yielding base. Thiswas slightly over-stressed inthe giant fifteen-meter longpaper trousers hung from theceiling close to the end of thebed. They were an obviousallusion to dominance with theopen fly, surrounded by a mass-ing of pins, echoing the mass ofneedles on the bed. One legslipped under the clustering ofballs on the ground and inter-rupted the flowing motion ofthe threads, intruding on thebed as a whole.Thread was the passagebetween the two opposites,linking, joining, uniting. Theprocess of making the ballswas a vital aspect of the work;the physical and laboriousmotion of winding thread byhand required help, bringingtogether a group of willing menand women. This forced atten-tion on tasks that traditionallyreside in the domain of women;sewing, weaving, crafts. thehome. The time required forthe work provided the oppor-tunity for focused considera-tion of the installation as awhole. For this reason it evolvedon a slight tangent from theoriginal idea. The result redo-lent of the patience, labor, anddevotion required to producesuch objects alone emphasizedcertain general qualities thatdistinguish female from male.The second piece, TheTemptation of St. Theresa, wasmade up of six wooden work-men's tool carriers suspendedat eye level. Each contained anover-spilling quality of facialcream, the cheap, chemicallyLin Tianmiao, The Proliferation of Thread Winding, 1994.installation. paper. needles. bed. thread.colored-white and cochinealpink-and harshly fragrancedkind. For Lin, these colors inti-mately relate to women-astraditional shades of underwear-as well as to beauty care as anecessity that is pumped downthe throat of any modernwoman. Again, the hard tex-ture and form of the boxesprovided a striking contrast tothe soft. gloopy nature of thecream. St. Theresa exemplifiesa life-long devotion to God-female subordination to a maleshe will serve unquestioningly,and in St. Theresa's case, with-out the time or the inclination.to be tempted to beautify her-self at all.Karen SmithWang GongxinWhat are you look-ing at?" asks a voicefrom the center ofthe room. "What indeed." weask. for on first sight the roomin which we are standing inWang Gongxin's home is com-pletely empty. But from wherewe stand in the doorway, thereis a further emptiness not vis-ible until we take a step nearerthe center of the room. A one-meter square chunk of tiledflooring has been removed andplaced at a diagonal to thespace it previously covered.Here, the surface is pierced, ahole is revealed beneath anddown in the depths of the earth.the blue "sky of Brooklyn"glows up at us. In full daylightit is easy to see that this is thescreen of an upturned televi-sion set, a video of the skyplaying a continuous loop alongwith a soundtrack that sends itquestions up to the viewer asthey peek into this meter-deephole. As evening falls. the illu-sion of a passage through theearth is awarded increasingimpact.It is a tale recounted of-ten in childhood that, if you digdeep enough. you can piercethe earth, tunnel right throughto the other side. From America.the opposite pole is China. andthe phrase used. "go dig a holeto China." emphasizes the in-unitv of such an undertaking. aASIA-PACIFIC SCULPTURE NEWS 49

Review: LIN TianMiao\u27s  New Works  Exhibition

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Review: LIN TianMiao\u27s New Works Exhibition

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