Threads and Wingding

Lin Tianmiao tried to capture disappeared and demolished traditional culture or architectures such as Chinese courtyard house and alleys through the way of winding threads on historical foggy backgrounds, using slight lines to reconstruct the scene in order to keep nostalgic poetry in the works. For the artist, the process of winding has the ability to calm her down. Also, the thread has the meaning of aggregating and dismantling power, showing a process of being realistic or unrealistic. “Seeing Shadow” series started in 2005 and has tried different ways of printmaking.

In the work, a bonsai-like plant’s roots extend downwardly with a metal cylinder as if it is still gorwing and expanding; meanwhile, the thread-wrapped plant stands with a dangerous stance as it is heavier on the top but thinner on the bottom. Thousands of miniature human body in gold are randomly piled up like soil underneath the tree. The artist brings two divergence - being alive and being dead - into this piece, trying to throw a question to viewers that whether the infrastructure only could be built up on the basis of losing our freedoms.

Threads and winding are always the indispensable languages in Lin Tianmao's works. She uses black, white, and grey as a fundamental tone in this series. Various types of rubber tubes or metal components are wrapped with white or grey silk along with uneven edges in the end of the threads, and placed on a white or grey sillk cloth, creating a layer of purity and frailty through a variable visual density. This is not the first time that Lin uses threads to wrap the machinery, thus it is obvious to see her mature control of solid and tender components on the surface of canvas.

The “Meshes series” , which has been showed in Paris and Hong Kong, is made of delicate bones with a sense of death and winding silk threads that the artist is familiar with. Unlike her other installation works that usually run out of the boundaries of  frames, Lin Tianmiao deliberately restricted the  threads and the broken bones in wooden borders; thus a strong contrast between sweet, harmless,  naive colors and lattice space’s limitation, inanimate bones was born. Normally, social metaphors are often found in her works’ topics, but the audience still could be amazed by their visual power at the first time, experiencing an emotion that is difficult to appease afterward. Rather than giving answers directly without any twists and turns, the artist tried to provide a story scene via her works for viewers to interpret its value by their own.