Michael Lin

Michael Lin (born 6 November 1964) is a Taiwanese artist who lives and works in Brussels, Belgium and Taipei, Taiwan.

He was born in Tokyo, Japan, and grew up in Taiwan and the United States.

Lin is considered a leading Taiwanese contemporary painter and conceptual artist.

Lin was born in Tokyo in 1964 to a Taiwanese family, and raised in Taiwan.

His family immigrated to Los Angeles in 1973, during a time of political uncertainty for Taiwan.

Lin embraced the multiculturalism of Southern California, and took an interest in its art and skateboarding scenes.

Lin graduated from Otis Art Institute of Parsons School of Design, Los Angeles in 1990, and obtained an MFA from Art Center College of Design, Pasadena in 1993.

He counted among his influences the artists Daniel Buren, Dan Graham, and Franz West, the essayist Elaine Scarry and her work on culture in the body, and Taiwanese New Wave Cinema directors such as Hou Hsiao-hsien, Tsai Ming-liang, and Edward Yang.

Lin has worked as an artist in Taipei, Paris, Brussels, and Shanghai.

He currently lives and works in Brussels and Taipei.

Lin moved to Taipei from Los Angeles in 1993.

The artist Richard Lin, a relative on his father's side, became an important early mentor.

For two years Lin worked as a bartender at the independent artist-run IT Park Gallery (伊通公園), where he met a group of like-minded artists and launched his career.

Lin's first solo exhibition, Meander (IT Park, 1994), featured monochrome steel panels spray-painted at an auto body shop.

Lin had been exposed to industrial and automotive design at art school, where he adopted the materials and techniques for painting with car lacquer and spray guns.

However, he did not find the Taipei audience as receptive to his work's minimalist aesthetic rooted in Los Angeles car culture.

Lin responded to the challenge of audience communication with Interior (IT Park, 1996).

He modeled a domestic setting in the gallery space by re-locating some of his home furnishings, including two carpets, a stereo, and his music collection, with a sign that read, "Please remove your shoes before stepping on to the carpet. Feel free to choose from the selection of music."

Lin opened a dialog between the public space of the gallery and the private space of the home, to address the gap between his and his audience's conceptions of contemporary art.

This initiated the role of the public in Lin's work, his concept of artist as host and audience as guest, and his approach of creating participatory artwork using everyday objects.

Interior was Lin's first exhibition to feature paintings with flower motifs.

He had chanced upon embroidered muslin pillowcases in his home, and recalled the traditional floral patterns from his youth in the countryside, where they would adorn the bedding given as part of a wedding dowry.

He crafted frames the same size as the pillows, copied their patterns and projected them onto a canvas, and reproduced them as colorful paintings.

With House (Bamboo Curtain Studio, 1998), Lin began working on an architectural scale, filling an entire wall of the exhibition space with a 45 square meter floral patterned mural.

Complementary (Dimension Endowment of Art, 1998) paired paintings of pillowcases with a raised tatami mat featuring real pillows.

This public resting place created a kind of "social sculpture", and Lin removed a wall to let in natural light.

For Imported (La Ferme du Buisson, 1998), he replicated a scenario from his hometown daily life by installing tables and stools and offering hundreds of cigarettes and bottles of Taiwan Beer to visitors, framed by billboards for the brands.

Lin's contribution to the group show Tu parles/J'écoute (Taipei Fine Arts Museum, 1998) invited the other artists to document the lighting conditions for their artworks, and integrated their drawings and descriptions into a new multimedia work with sound samples of museum visitor announcements.

Untitled–Cigarette Break (IT Park, 1999) featured flower print paintings and a pair of Le Corbusier LC-2 chairs partially upholstered with the same patterns, as a critique of the relationship between art, design, and architecture, and the opposition of ornamentation with modernism.

Lin continued to explore the role of the public and the environment in his work.

Lin was invited to participate in the 2000 Taipei Biennial, The Sky is the Limit, curated by Jérôme Sans and Manray Hsu.

He created a "social space" in the entrance hall of the Taipei Fine Arts Museum, deploying a large-scale floor painting decorated with phoenix and peony motifs and furnished with cushions bearing the same pattern.

After 2000, Lin received numerous invitations to exhibit his work abroad.

He represented Taiwan at the 2001 Venice Biennale, and participated in the 2001 Istanbul Biennial and the 2002 Gwangju Biennale.

Lin moved his studio to Paris in 2002.

That year he was commissioned by Nicolas Bourriaud and Jérôme Sans to create a site-specific installation and floor painting for the café lounge at Palais de Tokyo.

For Grind (MoMA PS1, 2004), Lin installed an indoors skateboard half-pipe decorated with a floral motif, and presented a similar work based on a traditional design from the Shanghai fabric market at the group show Odyssey (Shanghai Gallery of Art, 2004).

Bourriaud and Sans invited Lin to the 2005 Biennale de Lyon, where he covered La Sucrière in a 100 square meter mural of an enlarged wallpaper pattern.

He followed this up with Notre Histoire (Palais de Tokyo, 2006), featuring a large mural painting from a cartoon image.

He continued to create installations for museums, such as such as Kiasma Day Bed (Kiasma, 2001), and for large public spaces, such as ATRIUM STADHUIS DEN HAAG, 12.07-08.09.2002 (The Hague City Hall, 2002).