Lin Tianmiao
Mother's!!!
26 July - 24 August 2008
Long March Space, Beijing

Check out more information about the artist and her work for example the interview by Lu Jie with Lin Tianmiao in her studio, a preview to the exhibited pieces, ... www.longmarchspace.com

fig.: Lin Tianmiao Mother's!!! No. 12-1 (detail), 2008. Courtesy: The artist and Long March Space, Beijing

Lin Tianmiao, a representative female artist of Chinese contemporary art, entitles her exhibition "Mother's!!!" for her installation works about the idea of 'mother' and maternal instinct, seeking to express the "yin" (Chinese philosophical principle) and feminine characteristics of people and things. "Mother's!!!" recalls the process of raising a child. The apostrophe in the title references material possession and ownership, alluding to ideas of familial inheritance and a continued human story.

The title of this exhibition also holds a contradiction in that in Chinese slang "Ma de (Mother's)" is a swear word, and thus this language holds a deliberately chosen derogatory overtone.

To express her idea on 'mother' Lin Tianmiao has sculptured around dozen figures of middle aged women of various size and stature. Their heads have been made abstract or have been removed. The females are put into postures which suggest their interconnected relationship with the animal and plant world.

Through trial and error, Lin Tianmiao found a malleable, easily preservable new material to become the main material to create the new series of the work Mother’s!!!, and combined it with the hair, silk and balls of thread. 

"The boundaries between people and their surroundings; male and female; internal and external and between different types of species are both blurred and broken, creating a chaotic scene which questions the nature of the world it inhabits. These strange “landscapes” recall those of Jacques Lacan’s materialization of “imago”, whereby form takes shape in the imagination’s intermingling of time and space, and the function of “I” is revealed through psychoanalytic experience. 
...
We could also take the Lacanian outlook of “the mirror” to challenge ways of interpreting post-feminism’s theoretical change. The artist invites the viewer to use their intuition and interpretation of the installation, to experience the realizations and reflections on the subtle connections – between the body and mind, society and the natural world, ethics and material value, and reason and emotion – of a middle-aged female artist." Long March Space, Beijing

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fig.: Lin Tianmiao Mother's!!! No. 12-1, 2008. Courtesy: The artist and Long March Space, Beijing