Lot 748: LIN MINGHONG B. 1964

STORYTELLER

measurements note
wooden floor 488 by 500 cm. 192 1/8 by 196 7/8 in.

three pieces of sofa, lamp and handpainted wooden floor

EXHIBITED

Japan, Mori Museum, The Elegance of Silence: Contemporary Art from East Asia, March 29-June 19, 2005

NOTE

Storyteller, made in collaboration with the Italian furniture company Moroso, is composed of four pieces of furniture arranged on the floor in salon style, all painted in identical Taiwanese floral designs. Storyteller was recently exhibited at The Elegance of Silence: Contemporary Art from East Asia at the Mori Art Museum in Tokyo Japan (March ¨C June 2005).

Lin was born in Tokyo Japan, and grew up in Taipei, Taiwan. He was educated in the US and currently lives both in Taipei and Paris. Lin's global upbringings, education and travels have helped shape his artistic career. As Lin encountered different cultures, he began his focus on his own history and his domestic surroundings. In 1996, after returning to Taiwan, he began to work on floral designs inspired directly from objects at home. Lin explained that, "At this time I was just starting to resettle in Taiwan after thirteen years of living in America. I was working on my art at home and going to work at the gallery where I also showed my art. I was reacting to a very immediate question. I was exploring the relationships...(among) my life, my art, and this new but not foreign cultural context."[1] Lin hand-painted 1940s and 50s Taiwanese fabric patterns prevalent in everyday Taiwan yet often unnoticed by everyday citizens. He blends traditional patterns with postmodern Italian designs in order to redefine the meaning of a "home".

The viewer enters the created space as if they were entering a high-end design furniture shop. Like a bright and dreamy stage-set, Storyteller is a fictional space in which the viewer writes down their own story as they enter the space. The private space becomes public immediately, as the viewer becomes the subject being viewed. Lin's installation forges a bond between art and life, tradition and contemporaneity, private and public, and reality and fiction. Shannon Fitzgerald commented that, "By upholstering high-end furniture designs in vernacular patterns, Lin plunges the viewer into the cultural confluence of craft and fine art, Eastern and Western visual language. Notions of nationalist identity dissipate through commodification. The cultural elitism that dismisses the "Made in Taiwan" label is destabilized. The label now reads Taiwan, but also Italy, Afghanistan, Paris and Japan."[2]

[1] Jerome Sans, "The Other Side: An Interview with Michael Lin," in Michael Lin (exhibition catalogue-Paris, Palais de Tokyo, Site de Creation Contemporaine, 2000), unpaginated.
[2] Shannon Fitzgerald, "Confluence," Michael Lin, St. Louis, Contemporary Art Museum, 2004.