Setouchi Triennale 2016 : Art report - Lin Tianmiaw

Gentle breeze blows through the small hill of Ogi island. It is the moment you can relax under the strong sun beam of Setouchi inland sea. This panoramic place stands a house with a well and small garden. It seemed to be once a house of comparatively wealthy family among Ogi island. In the garden of this 150 years old house blooms one pink rose as if it is welcoming the visitors.

Once you step inside the house through entrance, a huge work come right in front of you. Five huge rings rotate in layers. Each ring is full of objects such as everyday goods of the family, awards of some competitions, souvenir goods, memorial goods and so on. These objects on the ring rotate as if the memory of the family and this house starts to move. It gives us an impression of the time of the house itself starts to move on once again to create a new story.

This work is by Chinese artist, Lin Tianmiao. She started her career as a textile designer although finding difficulties in order to realize what she really wants to do in the field of textile; she decided to work as an artist. Her husband is a famous video artist王光新. The material used in her work specifically is cotton, and by combing this material with using this shapeless material, she combines it with hard material like metal.

Our collaboration starts back in 2003, for the second edition of Echigo-Tsumari Triennale where she made a huge ball of thread which grows larger when people walk around it. It was a work that reminds people of the textile industry of Tokamachi city and its history. In 2014, for the art festival at Ichihara, she showed strange objects composed of bones and things that were gathered from closed local school.

It is our third collaboration this time and gradually our understanding of ideas about a sit-specific work is deepened each other. When she came to site visit, she selected things to use from the house with imagining a lot about the life and the people once was here. We hope the visitors would share the same imagination from the artist’s latest work.

(reported by Hideyuki Shoji, Art Front Gallery)