Michael Lin

Urban Acupuncture

The giant intervention curated by Ximena Caminos redefines Miami’s landscape architecture.

Michael Lin is an artist living and working in Taipei and Brussels. Lin turns away from painting as an object of contemplation toward one of painting as a bounded, physical space, one we can settle into and inhabit. Lin is recognized as a painter who orchestrates monumental installations that re-conceptualize and reconfigure public spaces. Using patterns and designs appropriated from textiles his works have been exhibited in major institutions and international Biennials around the world, The Rock Bund Art Museum 2012, The Auckland Triennial and the California Pacific Triennial 2013, High Museum 2015, Museum Contemporary Art and Design, Manila 2016, and most recently at the National Gallery of Victoria.

Transforming the institutional architecture of the public museum, his unconventional paintings invite visitors to reconsider their usual perception of those spaces, and to become an integral part of the work, giving meaning to its potential as an area for interaction, encounter, and re-creation. For Art Basel Miami Beach, HoneyLab commissioned him to re-imagine the Savoy Hotel’s pool deck and outdoor lounge. In his own words:

This work comes about through my interest in a historical style that swept across Europe during the mid 17th Century. Chinoiserie is a wholly European style whose inspiration is entirely Oriental. Chinoiserie, which roughly translates into Chinese things, is not an imitation of Chinese objects, but is the tangible and solid realizations in the West of a land of the imagination.

For Centuries China has fascinated the imagination of the West. For a long time there was only the haziest idea of where China was, who lived there or how they lived. Those few travel-stained merchants who penetrated its shores returned to Europe with silk, porcelain, tea, and lacquer: inimitable products fabled in the West, whose extraordinary qualities were augmented by heavily embellished tales of their home country. These ingredients conjured up the land of Cathay: a recipe for romantic speculation, creating fantastic visions of luxury and refinement, pleasure and abundance, akin to the excesses of Miami Beach.

MICHAEL LIN