Artists
Photo Credit: NIU Chun-Chiang
LIN Ren-Hsin
LIN Ren-Hsin
| Location | USA / Colorado |
|---|---|
| Residency | Anderson Ranch Arts Center |
| Year of the Grant | 2007 |
| Work | Butterfly Kingdom (solo exhibition) |
| Personal Website | LIN Ren-Hsin's Personal Website |
Artist Statement
The opportunity to create work in a foreign country and live in a place with different languages, cultures, living habits, and natural scenery allowed me to reflect on my own background, as well as on the environment in which I grew up. This experience of participating in an Artist-in-Residence program abroad deepened the thoughts and feelings I had for Taiwan. My work explores the relationships between forms of information, the personal, and the environment. We live in the age of the internet. Information floods our everyday lives, especially in Taiwan, in which messages that are manipulated by the media are constantly being re-distributed. This information overload makes society wonder about the reality of a story, but it does not offer any truth to the original context.
Anderson Ranch Arts Center is located in the mountains away from the uproar of the city. It contains studios for all types of media, as well as dining areas, galleries, and lounges. It is surrounded by hiking and skiing vacation destinations, attracting people arts enthusiasts from all over the world. Working and living in this calm and beautiful environment makes one think more in depth about the connection between humanity and nature.
During my residency, I participated in workshops through two different media: wood firing (ceramics) and printmaking. The Wood Rock series was made of ceramic, and I completed the Butterfly Kingdom series through printmaking. Wood Rock was inspired by the wood grain seen on the exterior of walls on local buildings. I created rock forms with wood grain surfaces in clay and attempted to talk about the philosophy of cyclical transformation through material change (the wood generated fire, the fire changed the original properties of clay, and the clay turned hard like a rock).
The main forms and lines in Butterfly Kingdom were created utilizing etching and aquatint printmaking techniques. The bodies of the butterflies were inspired by the forms of ships, missiles, and airplanes. I cut and pasted periodicals published by the Anderson Ranch Arts Center, as well as free papers and magazines from neighboring towns to create compositions like that of an illustrated handbook. I explored the relationships between modern-day forms of information, humanity, and the environment through this body of work.