Biography

Born in 1964 in Guangzhou, Guangdong Province, China, Lin Yilin studied sculpture as an undergraduate at the Guangzhou Academy of Fine Arts, graduating in 1987. Lin pursues a multifaceted practice rooted in site-specific performance. Drawing from shifting socioeconomic conditions, the fluctuating political landscape, and experiences of cultural displacement, he reimagines the relations between the self, community, and surrounding urban and rural environments in a globalized context. Lin’s involvement in the Guangzhou-based Big Tail Elephant Working Group (formed in 1990) was pivotal in shaping his responses to and interventions in the catalytic urban development of Southern China. Throughout the 1990s, a decade of rapid economic growth in China, Lin made a series of works using bricks under the rubric of “social construction.” His most well-known work from this period is Safely Maneuvering across Linhe Road (1995), for which the artist moved a stack of concrete blocks one by one across a busy street in a newly developed zone in Guangzhou. Also documented in a video, this 90-minute action performed time and labor as commodities in a globalized, neoliberal capitalist world. Since his move to New York in 2001, Lin has expanded his scope to working with both local and international communities, from college students in Norway to families in China and farmers in Thailand. For Documenta, in 2007, Lin built a freestanding wall with a small hole in it in the Nordstadtpark in Kassel, Germany, and staged a tug-of-war pitting local residents against visitors from abroad. Titled The Game of Monumentality, this work interrogates the social function of monuments and the public’s role in determining their meaning. During his 2011 residency at Kadist Art Foundation in San Francisco, Lin organized a series of performances involving local Chinese immigrants, exploring how one renegotiates identity when navigating a new environment. In 2018, Lin created three interconnected works that incorporate virtual reality technology and extreme endurance-based performances. The work is inspired by the German philosopher G. W. Leibniz’s “Monadology” (1714), which proposes that the universe is composed of an infinite number of simple substances, or “monads,” each of which is perfect and self-sufficient. Commissioned for the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, together these three works form an inquiry into the dynamics between subject and object, and the potential for using technology to transform our relationship to the “other.” Lin divides his time between New York and Beijing, where he teaches in the School of Experimental Art at the Central Academy of Fine Arts. He has had solo exhibitions at Arrow Factory, Beijing (2009); The Land Foundation, Chiang Mai, and Tang Contemporary Art, Bangkok (2010–11); San Francisco Art Institute Walter and McBean Galleries, San Francisco (2012); and Video Bureau, Beijing (2014). Additionally, the Big Tail Elephant Group has been featured in exhibitions at Kunsthalle Bern (1998) and Times Museum, Guangzhou (2016). International group exhibitions and biennials include Gwangju Biennial (2002); Guangzhou Triennial (2002); Venice Biennale (2003 and 2015); Lyon Biennial (2009); Go Figure: Five Contemporary Videos, Asia Society, New York (2010); A Line Made by Walking, Haifa Museum of Art, Israel (2011); and Art and China after 1989: Theater of the World and One Hand Clapping, both at the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, New York (2017–18 and 2018, respectively).