Lin Tianmiao — Est-ce permis ? (Est-ce possible ?) — 可以吗？（可能吗？） — Lelong & Co Gallery — Exhibition — Slash Paris

Past: November 14, 2013 → January 11, 2014

Lin Tianmiao, born in Taiyuan in the province of Shanxi in 1961, is one of the first women artists of China to achieve international recognition. At the end of the 1980’s, after studying drawing in Beijing, she went to New York with her husband Wang GongXin, a well-known video artist. They lived in Brooklyn for 7 years, spending time with artists of the Chinese community including Ai Wei Wei. The discovery of the work of Eva Hesse led her to installations.

When she returned to Beijing in 1995, she took part in the exhibition Women’s Approach to Contemporary Art at the Beijing Art Museum. She presented a founding installation: The Proliferation of Thread Winding. In this work, the influences received are blended with memories from childhood — the use by women of silk thread, long and tedious house work — to be transformed into dreamlike evocation and social commentary. Lin Tianmiao had found her own style, producing works that question Chinese society and its relationship with the antagonisms that run through it: past/present; masculine/feminine; tradition/globalization. Through her singular story, the work of Lin Tianmiao is radically different from contemporary Chinese contemporary production which is most often a synthesis of Pop-art and socialist realism with a pinch of post-modern cynicism.

In 2012, the Asia Society Museum of New York presented its first retrospective: Bound unbound, which received a warm welcome, as indicated in particular by the publication in Art News of a feature article by Barbara Pollack, while Lin Tianmiao appears on the cover of the magazine. At the same time, Galerie Lelong New York was showing her recent work, Badges. The works of Lin Tianmiao can be found in the collections of the Hong Kong Museum of Art, the Brooklyn Museum, the Museum of Modern Art New York, the National Gallery Cambera, the Museum of Modern Art of San Francisco, and the Museum of Art of Singapore.