Lin Yan's Migrations: Paper as a Medium Back Home

摘要

For the 2009 exhibition Slash: Paper Under the. Knife at New York's Museum of Arts and Design, former chief curator David Revere McFadden identified paper as a commonplace material that "carries little or no cultural, social, or economic baggage."1 McFadden draws from both a Western treatment of paper as a practical material and, more specifically, from modernist encounters with paper as a universal, ubiquitous, flexible medium unto itself. In contrast, coming from a society where over the centuries paper has accrued deep significance beyond its materiality, contemporary artist Lin Yan has selected the very term "cultural" to define her use of the medium.2 You could even say that Lin Yan favors Xuan zhi arid other handmade papers of her native China precisely because of their cultural baggage. Rigorously trained in oil painting in Beijing, Lin Yan was initially attracted to paper by a desire to expand beyond the two-dimensional, framed format of painting. After she migrated to New York by way of Paris in the late 1980s, she began to transition into multi-dimensional art works formed of paper that she, like McFadden, at first perceived as a perfectly adaptable medium. For Lin Yan, paper, often joined with ink, enabled explorations of minimalist form and feeling as well as philosophic meditations on harmony and balance. But in time, her relationship with paper shifted toward a distinctly cultural narrative. She implicitly identifies with Xuan paper5 both as a native material linked to Chinese culture and as one of the four treasures of the study, the chosen paper for literati ink painting, poetry, and calligraphy.4 Wielding paper, Lin Yan expands modernist expression, but also secures her ties to place and home.