Essay for Michael Lin's "I am the Sun" show

Michael Lin – The Difference of the Same

[copyright] Pauline J. Yao, courtesy of Eslite Gallery, Taipei


The work of artist Michael Lin concerns itself with the experience of limits. More accurately, it articulates a feeling of liminality, of being suspended between the spaces, places and moments of our daily lives. Through his practice, which hovers between painting and installation, and overlaps with fields of relational art, architecture, and design, we experience a fluid interrogation into the social and political dimensions of form. Like other artists working under the rubric of relational aesthetics Lin also engages with relational form—the utilization of the sphere of human relations as artistic medium—yet his engagements are more likely to assert values of difference rather than adhere to that movement’s tendency towards universalizing commonality. Himself a product of several cultures, Lin is especially attuned to the demarcations of such differences, and thus persistently questions not only the understanding of ‘culture’ in its specificity and its very formation, but also the workings of its erasure and undoing.



Historically, Michael Lin’s practice has aimed at transforming the conventions of how modern art functions—namely, the radical separation of art and its public. For Complementary (1998), he hung seven paintings of fabric designs on the wall of a gallery space and in the middle installed a daybed on which visitors were invited to sit, relax and recline among cushions carrying the same fabric designs. Viewers experienced a closing of the gap between the art object expressly made for individual visual consumption and an encounter which was designed to elicit human contact and shared interaction. The work efficiently demonstrated a major precept of contemporary art in our time: art is not simply something to be looked at, it is to be experienced in real time, often through tangible means. The project launched Lin’s ongoing fascination for using large-scale paintings of textile patterns to transform non-descript, transitional architectural spaces into ‘situations’ that introduced a dimension of social interaction and shared conviviality to the typically solitary art viewing experience.

Recently, Lin’s interests have turned away from the dynamics of space and towards an investigation into the contingencies of time and place. An example of this shift might be found in his recent solo show What a Difference a Day Made in 2008, in which the entire contents of a typical daily products store or 杂货店zahuodian were purchased, catalogued, transported and re-arranged in a gallery space. The project prompted considerations of not only the formal qualities of such everyday items as colanders, spoons and fly swatters, but also the stoppage of time, achieved through isolating these objects from their place in history and locality and underscoring their soon-to-be-relic status within Shanghai’s rapidly developing society.



His current solo exhibition “I am the Sun”, however, proceeds from a different locale—the artist’s native place of Taiwan—and embodies a more nuanced set of concerns. The title alone indicates the passage and progression of time but, more importantly, links up the role of time with the formation of individual and cultural identities. One might say the works in the exhibition share a uniformity of difference—the notion of difference is internalized in the object (in this case paintings and photographs) at the same time as it is being expressed through certain visual strategies. “I am the Sun” is notable not only for its subject matter and size but its scope: it contains several series of paintings, wall murals, photographic prints and two “events” coordinated through Eslite’s bookshop—all specially created for this occasion.



However, Lin’s return to a more conventional exhibition form, exhibiting discrete paintings and photographs rather than ‘site-specific’ installation based work is anything but predictable. He continues to mine cultural histories to powerful effect, bringing to light objects and symbols that speak to moments and territories of in-betweeness and thresholds of individual experience. Two examples are Untitled (2006-2008) based on the Tangram, a Chinese puzzle game consisting of seven flat geometrical shapes that are put together in different combinations to form shapes; and Untitled (2009), paintings of Chinese language study notebooks, a common item used in Taiwan’s schools for language instruction. As objects themselves both represent processes of learning by invoking early stages of life when certain culturally encoded systems such as visuality and language are imprinted on our psyche, and yet the depiction of the notebooks in reverse hints at an even further deconstruction. It is the structural breakdown of these systems—of images into objectifiable geometric parts, of language into pronounceable mono-syllabic components—which Lin calls attention to, highlighting the moment of flux and fluidity before these frameworks become solidified and later, internalized.



Lin’s choice of the logo and design of the infamous Taiwanese Sun Bakery is motivated by a similar to explore innate systems of perception, but extends to include the limits of essentialized cultural symbols. The ‘original’ Sun Bakery in Taichung has become somewhat of a myth—whole streets are now lined with Sun Bakeries, one more eager than the next to proclaim its own status as the original. It is the meanings we attach to authenticity and uniqueness which Lin seeks to destabilize here, and the Sun Bakery, for all of its embodiments of ‘Taiwaneseness’ and cultural legitimacy, makes a particularly apt target. With one stroke Lin counteracts this iconic status. I am the Sun (2009) is the Sun Bakery logo stripped of all of its distinguishing trademarks, returning it to a generic, even monotonous, type of graphical form. This is carried through in the gift-giving event in which individual suncakes bearing Lin’s own self-designed logo and packaging are distributed for free to the public. Together with Lin’s time-based book wrapping event (the artist had every book in Eslite’s Fine Art book section wrapped with floral wallpaper for a week-long period) these gestures also revisit the artist’s earlier dabbling in processes of social reciprocity and interaction and point to the potential for art to move beyond the limitations of the gallery context.



“520” (2008) is a series of 12 photographs taken by the artist on May 20, 2008 on his walk home from his studio in Shanghai. The date carries significance for the artist—it was the inauguration day of Taiwan’s new president Ma Yingjeou—and yet the newsstands he passed on the streets bear no evidence of this momentous occasion. For Lin, this lack of a trace becomes a trace itself, an indication of the paramount differences that exist politically even within a context of supposed parity, not to mention physical proximity. A series of photographs entitled Complementary (1998-2009) also evoke an eerie absence, yet here remains a trace, this time of human presence. The trace of time is also apparent, as photographs taken at different intervals over the course of the exhibition period track from light to dark suggesting the movement of the sun across the sky and the slow rotation of the earth. Inherent to this is the concept of repetition and recurrence, evident in Lin’s ‘blue paintings’ which use a form of disordered serial painting to drive home notions of sameness and subtle variation.



Viewing “I am the Sun”, one is confronted with the various ways in which we conceive, understand, and categorize our perceptions of difference and by that token, the limitations of our own self. The purposely rough, imperfect appearance of some of the canvases elicits another question – are these works even finished? – leaving us with the feeling that we have entered truly ambiguous territory, where the ground no longer feels solid beneath our feet. Through these works, Michael Lin continually reveals the elasticity of culture and visual form, inviting us to examine closer the potential of art as it occurs both within and outside the gallery’s walls.

Beijing/Taipei, April 2009

Michael Lin at Eslite - book wrapping project