Lin Yilin is from the old skool of the Guangzhou Big Tail Elephant Group, a posse of progressives down south who found inspiration in urbanization and its accoutrements (building materials, migrant labor and lots of fast (sur)real estate ca$h) in the late 80’s early 90’s when the avante-garde was perhaps aptly titled. He was in Shanghai last week was it last week?- hard to keep up anymore, for a solo show at Shanghai Gallery of Art otherwise known as Husheng Hualang which is under new management after the high-princess of the Sichuan School, Weng Ling left for dryer maybe higher ground... we’re all waiting for her to pop up out of the ground somewhere soon but no one can yet say for certain where that may be… Meanwhile David Chan is the main, and slightly overtaxed, man. I met Lin Yilin for the first time through Cao Weijun (who also works at the gallery but in reduced capacity these days having had some body and soul issues) while we were all living our hiphop lives in NYC. Lin Yilin was fresh off the boat- so to speak- just getting acquainted with the Chinese art Diaspora in NYC and revving up for his new life in a new city… he came to an exhibition opening of mine and I still use a photo with Cao and Lin standing in front of my work to document it. The piece was a photo installation depicting a girls softball game that Roberta Smith in the NYTimes mistook for a cricket game –It was meant to metaphorically collapse the space of an otherwise claustrophobic courtyard with the added addition of window onto somewhere else… but that’s another story altogether. Lin Yilin still lives in NYC. Greenpoint, Brooklyn to be exact, in the old apartment of Qian Zhijian’s (critic, NYU Chinese art history doctorate, last seen teaching at Parsons) on India St. to be even more exact. It’s right near the studio that I gave up last month as the result of one mutha of a subletter nightmare. Before that Lin Yilin and I would once in a while have coffee, talk shop, while Greenpoint’s garbage processing plants glimmered in the distance. Soooo now a year or so later Lin Yilin is in Shanghai reminiscing not about Brooklyn but about the late 80s in Guangzhou -when a new influx of money caught everybody off guard and effected some funny incidences- He was talking with his head thrown back like he was back in the golden days of naivete all the while fiddling with his new iPhone at a restaurant with lousy service and even lousier Peking Opera performances. MianMian who, sitting next to him, after six years of not publishing a book, due to birthing a child, bouts with rehab and now a fundamentalist, diet coke downing Buddhist sits next to him talking in and out of English/Chinese about Chinese artists in the most enlightened way: “Chinese artists don’t need sex- because they’re always fucking each other” I think most people in the circle knows what she means. Lin Yilin’s show was very well installed – lots of big video projections inside partitions created especially for them and then one big fiberglass sculpture of “San Mao” sitting spotlight under the atrium. It reminded me vaguely of the Ghandi Statue on Union Square. Like Ghandi San Mao has his holy qualities, I love San Mao (a dirty little beggar kid with 3 hairs (san mao) who hangs with the bourgeoisie during Shanghai’s gilded age. He’s a comic strip character who has been manifested elsewhere in black and white films, etc. One may argue (LYL may himself be in this piece) that he’s an integral part of modern Shanghai-ese culture) But I’m not sure what he was doing in the show … The other videos were raw funny performative – there was a document of a tug of war orchestrated by Lin Yilin as part of Documenta in Kassel, Germany over the summer. One other especially poignant piece depicts a class of white European kids on a tour of China. Here LYL turns them into stand ins for Chinese people: The group sits in a Chinese class room, rides the bus, sings KOK (Madonna’s Papa Don’t Preach) in effect the group embodies (due to their placement/context) the Chinese-ness that the (non-Chinese) audience seeks in Chinese things (esp. art). But they are white and western. They are our mirror. Yep. LYL NYC based, jetset, Chinese artist with his European kids in tow touring Shanghai. More on the subject
By the way that's LYL in the upper right next to Zhou Xiaohu who you've met earlier
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