D1

Wood, laquered birch plywood,
pillows

Michael Lin

Michael Lin is renown for his large-scale wall and floor paintings inspired by floral patterns derived from Taiwanese textiles of the 1950's. 
He designates art as a generous gift that he shares with the viewer. The gesture of hospitality embraces the visitor as a guest what allows the artist to stage a complex game between the private and the public, between modernity and tradition. The appropriation of everyday objects and patterns, all derived from his personal environment, allows him also to go beyond the classic opposition of modern aesthetic philosophy between the beautiful and the sublime.

He develops a relationship with his immediate environment and the people around him. "What a difference a day made" of 2008  was a powerful demonstration of how Lin, the globalized nomad and artist, is trying to reengage with his local reality. For this installation he purchased all the goods in a little hardware store in front of his house in Shanghai and brought it into the gallery, where he reconstructed the shop ,categorized in crates.

Lin's provocation was to use a cultural space as a frame to push our associations of the forms and functions of a mundane object to their extreme, and how we attach different meaning to art, objects, preservation.

Contemporary art is now confronted with an immense contradiction: while it is unprecedentedly globalized, popular, and integrated into the mainstream, its commodification makes it a part of the entertainment industry and the society of spectacle. This leads to a loss of the criticality and engagement with real life that go beyond consumerism.

With D1 Lin continues his engagement with the everyday, and thus his challenging of the society of spectacle. Lin grasps the mundane, commonplace, and unimaginative aspects of everyday life and uses them to disrupt the overriding spectacle. In his art, Lin wants to show us that that what we thought was marginal, is actually central to who we are.

D1 can also be seen as one of his platforms, as a physical framework for artistic intervention. Lin likes to incorporate the idea of a twofold integration of the visitor into his works. This physicality of the viewer's relationship to the work answers a canonical question of modernism, that of the management of duration in art.
Lin is treating the visitor/viewer as a raw material that plays a decisive role in the production of meaning.

He accomplishes this by changing the visitor's static act of viewing into a dynamic one by taking place in an environment, but also by reviving the question of what visual tools are necessary for the constitution of this bench/crate. D1 is about melancholy, “chinoiserie”, import-export, East and West,the crate is not around an object, the crate is the object.