Lin Yilin

SPRING

Household Goods I, 1992
Iron web, gray bricks, sanitary pumps

Born in Guangzhou in 1964, Lin Yilin graduated in the sculpture department of the Guangzhou Academy of Fine Arts in 1987. A member of the Southern Artists Salon, Lin later co-founded the art collective Big Tail Elephant with Chen Shaoxiong and Liang Juhui. Lin is one of the earliest performance artists in China, with works that explored the links between the body and the physical surroundings—sometimes with a degree of interference or disruption to daily life. In 1995, Lin created his most recognized artwork, Safely Maneuvering across Lin He Road, in which he built a temporary wall using gray bricks and then moved the bricks and hence moved the wall across Lin He Road, a busy Guangzhou street with turbulent traffic. A keen observer of the social developments in Southern China, Lin has also produced artworks based on Hong Kong issues, including the performance pieceDrive Shaft (1996), a variation of Safely Maneuvering across Lin He Road, Shark Proof Web(1997), and Twenty(2015). Lin currently lives and works in New York and Beijing.