Born 1961 China

Lin Tianmiao is an installation artist who explores gender issues in relation to women's role in Chinese society. Her art has a textural and tactile nature that plays on the senses.

She has become one of China 's most widely exhibited installation artists. Her works often consist of accumulations of old-fashioned, everyday objects that have been meticulously wrapped in white twine or cotton thread. The wrapping process preserves the objects but also changes them into useless, ghostlike forms.

Examples of her work include a small bare tree wrapped entirely in white twine, hung upside down. The installation ‘Childhood' consists of more than 75 wrapped children's toys; these include a tiny bicycle, toy airplanes, action figures, a giraffe and a robot. In Bound and Unbound (1997), Lin wrapped everyday household objects in white thread. Leaving a ghostly white form, the work touches upon issues of domestic labour, modernization and technology within China . Lin also uses photography and video. Her haunting monochrome portraits feature androgynous faces, veiled with strands of thread sewn into the canvas.

“In a work entitled ‘The Proliferation of Thread Winding', a video monitor is inserted into the pillow showing the artists hands endlessly winding the small balls of thread. On a simple level this is the substance of it; ‘women's work', intensive, repetitive, laborious and boring, testing personal levels of patience and endurance. The action of making it is also meditative; the regular repeat motion, like the mechanics of textile design, encouraged thoughts to wander over ‘women's things' associated with thread and the bed; the meaning of womanhood, the duty of a wife, and the role of ‘female' in a predominantly male world.” Karen Smith

Compared to her contemporaries in China , Lin Tianmiao became a practicing artist relatively late in years. She was in her mid-thirties and had developed and sustained a successful textile design business in New York . Whilst fine art had been a preoccupation, it wasn't until she returned to China with her husband artist Wang Gongxin in 1994, that she re-connected with the art scene and developed new work. Back in Beijing , the use of the couple's own studio as an exhibition space was significant because both were able to manipulate the physical environment around the requirements of their works, which would have been impossible in any public venue of the time in China .

“Our experience in New York taught me a great lesson: what being an artist meant, how real artists in the US live. It also gave us a different sense of material values. I realised that to be an artist you must first find your own character, form your own opinions, and way of living. Truly, being an artist is a state of mind as much as a way of life. It involves a different way of thinking about the world, which is crucial to conveying a message.” Lin Tianmiao.

As a child, Lin Tianmiao had attempted to learn a variety of traditional crafts. Her mother used raw thread, like twine, for everything, and it was Lin who was always asked to help her mother. This created a very vivid, deep memory for Lin. Working with thread now creates a very close connection to her past. It became a personal motif that represented her own passage from childhood to maturity.

“Today, Lin Tianmiao is one of China 's all too few women artists. In less than ten years she has clearly achieved much.” Karen Smith

“Critics labelled me a feminist. I looked in many books and catalogues of female artists to see if this was true but came to the conclusion that it is not the case. I had never thought I judged life, or presented a view of life from the perspective of being a woman, it was always from my own experience as a person who just happened to be a woman.” Lin Tianmiao

“I am not the kind of artist that can be added to each dish to flavour it or spice it up. Only in the process of working slowly can I eventually express myself. My situation is like drinking tea: you understand how and what it is only after drinking it.” Lin Tianmiao.