TAIWANESE INSTALLATION artist Michael Lin may have relocated to Paris four years ago, but he's hotter than ever in Asia.
This year, he decorated the fourth-floor VIP room of the new Louis Vuitton building in Taipei with his trademark floral motifs, even covering the interior of the lifts with bold, pink flower-stitched leather. Last month, Lin, 43, was at the Singapore Tyler Print Institute working on what for him is a small project: a print commissioned for the New York-based Asia Society's 50th anniversary celebration portfolio. This month, he's one of five artists selected for the opening exhibition of the Tang Contemporary Art gallery in Beijing's 798 art space.
In Beijing, he shares the large commercial gallery space with Wu Shanzhuan, Yang Yong, Yang Jiechang and Zheng Guogu for an exhibition called Surplus Value. 'There's a new generation of galleries in China that's very different from the earlier ones, that are much more ambitious in terms of the scale of the work they want to show and produce,' Lin says, citing the Shanghai Gallery of Art and the Galerie Urs Meile in Beijing as other examples.
'They're more like art centres than galleries. They're asking artists to do large-scale work and they're also inviting artists to make installations. They're not as concerned as others with having a product that can be easily moved and traded.'
Just as well, because Lin's latest installation is a landscape environment that measures 10 metres by 12 metres. He has built a wooden platform representing hills, valleys and plains, all painted with folkloric motifs. With this, Lin revisits some of his favourite themes such as the artist's relationship to the environment in which he works, his relationship to the audience, and the audience's perception of the art space.
Lin says the platform is 'a proposition and reflection on the built environment - somewhere between an idea of an environment and a real landscape - that is currently dominating every major city in China'. Viewers are encouraged to experience the work by strolling through the artificial landscape, which offers a view on the other art works.
Martina Koeppel-Yang, the curator of Surplus Value, which opened yesterday, says the concept of the show is questioning what makes contemporary art so attractive. 'One might also ask, what is left of art, if one eliminates all these outer factors, constituting the setting for contemporary art, such as international and official recognition and the market? And is it not exactly this left-over element, this surplus value, that constitutes art?'