haunting whites.

Lin Tianmio is a successful Chinese installation artist. She utilizes the color white by wrapping everyday household objects, threading silk, and creating incredibly evocative sculptures and images all exploring the role of woman. Her work often coming from the conflicted feelings she has toward these expected roles.



I particularly like her sculptural series Mothers, (images above and below) perhaps because of my adventure into motherhood, but really because of the poetic beauty of each piece. I love her use of strings and threads to attach and elaborate on her metaphors.


You can see some pretty direct influence by her favorite American artists such as Kiki Smith

and Ann Hamilton.


In reference to one of her signature pieces (above) a reviewer wrote:

Braiding (1998). Since 1998, Lin Tianmiao has executed a series of hauntingly pale photographic images of herself on canvas, hanging them like semi-transparent screens in exhibition spaces. In this 12-foot-tall installation work, the soft gray tones of the images are softened further by stitches that run randomly across the work’s surface, each one with its thread trailing out behind running down to accumulate on the floor below. These threads are meant as metaphors for all the tiny habits and customs that make up culture, and which can be experienced as bindings from which it requires great strength to break free.

Love that metaphor.

She has quite a web presence so plenty of resources and a thorough website (though a fancy one that takes forever to load each page) So see more of her haunting and beautiful work here.