David Ho Yeung Chan Michael Lin: Model Home/Model Museum Rockbund Art Museum, March 10–June 3, 2012

Michael Lin, Kiasma Day Bed, 200, emulsion on wood, pillows. Courtesy of the artist and Kiasma Museum, Helsinki.

ichael Lin’s body of work includes sound, design, painting, and architecture. Known for his large-scale installations using decorative patterns, Lin creates, in his own words, “an M 1 unremarkable place of respite” a temporary yet pleasurable dwelling. For Lin, space is generic, but place possesses its own specificity and necessitates a physical experience. While the audiences are often captivated by the artwork’s remarkable colour patterns, this appreciation can come at the expense of taking advantage of the potential for social interaction within a site-specific environment. For example, upon first viewing his Kiasma Day Bed (2001), shown at the Museum of Contemporary Art Kiasma at 2001, one might have considered it a minimalist sculpture, but, in fact, the object was a communal bed on which museum visitors are invited to take a brief nap. At a group exhibition titled Odyssey(s) (2004) held at the Shanghai Gallery of Art, Lin transformed an atrium into a half pipe for skateboarders. The shuttling movement of the skateboarders alluded to another form of travel, one that ties in nicely with the exhibition concept of looking at how artists who are living in the diaspora negotiate their own displacement. Putting the spectacular quality of both interventions aside, they convey Lin’s genuine desire to pry open a new social sphere that is playful and steeped in the language of aesthetics.

88 Vol. 11 No. 4 Michael Lin, There on 29.09–15.11.04, 2000, skaters on emulsion on wood. Photo: Vittorio Motedo. Courtesy of the artist and Shanghai Gallery of Art.

Since moving to Shanghai in 2006, Lin has taken an ongoing interest in exploring the many vernacular nuances of the city. Model Home at the Rockbund Art Museum (RAM) was Lin’s first major solo exhibition at a museum in mainland China, a watershed project that allowed the artist to re-examine his own creative lineage. Model Home, was not a conventional exhibition per se, but a proposition that reconsidered modes of artistic production. Mindful of the RAM’s history of active public programming, the artist proposed a new project that makes the whole process of producing an artwork and its labour transparent for the public to assess and to question the museum as a viable and responsive cultural platform. With the hype surrounding many ambitious artworks by Chinese artists during the past two decades, the role of labour in a fast-moving art world is often taken for granted. And so Lin relates two art historical references to the context of contemporary China, the Bauhaus, which coincides with the founding of the RAM building in 1933, and the Russian Constructivist movement, as a means of critiquing current artistic production and society. Lin claims:

The basic concepts for this exhibition refer to Russian Constructivism and Bauhaus theories, because the artists during this period in history were facing great changes in the world from industrialization to the creating of a socialist society. At this juncture in history artist sought out ways in which they could position themselves contribute and question these changes. 2

Model Home revolves around a large-scale wall painting that covers the interior walls of the entire museum in a pattern taken from a quilt owned by a worker who is employed by the artist. The focus here is not on the wall painting itself; the painting project is an impetus to uncover and examine the process of producing an artwork and to study how it affects our perception.

To realize this interdisciplinary project, Lin recruited a number of partners to collaborate. Tokyo-based architect Atelier Bow-Wow designed new

Vol. 11 No. 4 89 Michael Lin, installation view of Model Home/ Model Museum. Courtesy of Rockbund Art Museum, Shanghai.

living quarters for the workers who Michael Lin, workers’ housing during installation of Model were hired for the wall painting Home/Model Museum, Rockbund Art Museum, project; Chinese video artist Cheng Shanghai. Ran documented the process of installation and the daily lives of the hired workers; Lou Nanli, a local sound artist, used a computer to translate the painted patterns into Michael Lin, Michael Lin, installation view of Model sound that was played throughout Home/Model Museum. Courtesy of Rockbund Art the exhibition venue and during Museum, Shanghai. the duration of the exhibition; and Li Xiangning, a professor of theory and criticism from Shanghai’s , invited students to conduct an urban analysis of Shanghai. During the preparation for and process of wall painting, the workers were offered accommodation at newly designed living quarters located just outside of the museum specifically built for this project. These temporary structures were then relocated to the exhibition hall of the museum and also on the balcony for display before the exhibition opened. When I visited the empty living quarters on the balcony, in the absence of the workers and with the skyline as the backdrop, I was reminded that not a single part of this city has been left untouched by migrant workers, and behind the mirage of economic progress lies their human labour. Progressing to a lower floor of the museum, I saw two workers’ quarters placed side by side in the exhibition hall, one of them containing objects left by the workers, the other left empty with one of its facades now completely open. The design of these semi-permanent structures reiterates the emphasis on form and function that was synonymous with the Bauhaus.

90 Vol. 11 No. 4 Michael Lin, installation Within a museum context, these dwelling view of Model Home/ Model Museum. Courtesy units appeared to be out of place, yet they of Rockbund Art Museum, Shanghai. were made coherent based on their linear and structural qualities in relationship to the wall painting which bore Suprematist colour patterns. Lin intervened with such a visual accord by the use of ambient sound to disorient the audience and to question the site and its meaning. Inspired by Alexander Rodchenko’s workers’ club presented in Paris in 1925, Lin converted the second floor of the museum into a workers’ club, with cabinets showcasing research findings by university students on Shanghai and video documentation on the project. Inside the same room was a custom-made dining table and chairs designed by Lin for hosting a series of discussions and film screenings. Lin stages a total art environment, a kind of backdrop that bridges art, design, video under one roof to host a series of social gatherings and events and to encourage the public to active engage with a cultural institution.

Michael Lin, installation view of Model Home/ Model Museum. Courtesy of Rockbund Art Museum, Shanghai.

Michael Lin, installation view of Model Home/ Model Museum. Courtesy of Rockbund Art Museum, Shanghai.

Vol. 11 No. 4 91 Model Home was a courageous project for RAM to undertake as it critiqued the role and function of an institution. A parallel title for this exhibition could be Model Museum; could it be an aspiring model for a contemporary art museum now? Lin, while conscious of relational aesthetics, an approach that focuses on the engagement with a community to give art its meaning, decided to push this discussion further. He did this by, first, using the exhibition to create an open platform in order to facilitate a broader discussion on the relevance of museums and contemporary art practices; second, to downplay the role of the artist from a creator to one of provocateur; and, third, to actively engage the audiences and stakeholders from a specific locality through debate and discussion. This project was not about arriving at a unified meaning on the issue of artistic production; rather, it operated as a subtext to enable a discussion on a more adaptable institutional model that answers to the creative needs of artists and addresses the contingent quality of contemporary art that is so relevant to today’s world. The collaborative components of this project are well conceived, with precise orchestrations, it may be difficult for the audience to understand the work’s many subtitles in one go. That the artist has disclosed the process of production to the public through an interdisciplinary platform does not mean the audience will necessarily grasp the full, self- reflexive nature of this project. While not interested in launching an institutional critique or exposing the process of consecrating the cultural value of an art object, Lin and his collaborators expose the unbridgeable gap between the expected agencies of an institution and the interests of the common people. In light of the many new museums that will surely be built in China in the near future, Lin’s proposition is visionary and pertinent, and it invites museum directors and cultural bureaucrats to ponder the very spirit behind their grand plans before their museums open.

Notes 1 Michael Lin and Gerald Matt, “ The Body as a Site of Culture: Michael Lin in Conversation with Gerald Matt,” in Michael Lin: Kunsthalle Wien project space 20.4–29.5.2005, eds. Sabine Folie and Gerald Matt (Vienna: Kunsthalle Wien, 2005), 60. 2 Michael Lin, “Model Home, A proposition by Michael Lin Exhibition Guide” (Shanghai: Rockbund Art Museum, 2012), 11.

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