Visit:
Long March Space
From installation works to conceptual photography, the art of highly influential female artist Lin Tianmiao deftly combines details of everyday life experience through an acute understanding of material, and a deft personal style and perspective. The works shown in this exhibition at Long March Space extend upon her stylistic language, creatively expressing the possibilities for print works by subverting conventional conceptions of medium. This new expression of print making was recently recognized by the Museum of Modern Art in New York, who have collected four of her print works that are currently included in the exhibition Multiplex: 1970 Until Now, Direction of Modern Art.
The prints included in Focus: Works on Paper at Long March Space, were created at the renowned Singapore Tyler Print Institute. In close collaboration with leading print makers and technicians from around the world, Lin Tianmiao completed two series of works during her eight-week period in Singapore, the series Focus and Seeing Shadow, both of which are included in this exhibition. Capturing the key technical elements of pressing and engraving print works, these series break the conventional modes of print by going beyond copper etching and silk-screening, rather daringly combining different methods of production to start with the creation of the paper itself. This process has produced unforeseen results in the form of unique and un-reproducible series of works. Both Focus and Seeing Shadow are cast upon a backdrop of enlarged and hazy images whose compositions begin to change as they enter into a subtle dialogue with the materials and the constructed weavings, lines and circular indentations. The Focus series enlarges the image of a human portrait, the overlapping of the image and the material forming a cultural metaphor. Seeing Shadow selects images of ruins or buildings that are currently being torn down in Beijing as their background. A subtle and sensitive mood is evoked from these works, which meld a fading of cultural tradition with the passing of time, sentiments bound to paper through the unique printing process of Lin Tianmiao.