Hou hanru biography of donald
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Michael Lin, public artist
For more than a decade Michael Lin has been using vivid floral motifs mainly derived from traditional Taiwanese fabrics to cover a variety of surfaces, ranging from conventional canvases to large-scale walls. The resulting works are energetic, beautiful, and even poetic, and they often contrast starkly with their environments. Lin’s reintroduction of ornamental elements into the world of contemporary art from which they are often excluded has been a fresh and provocative strategy. By shifting public attention to something that for a long time has been considered backward, and even regressive, he prods us to revaluate the commonplace as an equally creative and therefore significant expression of imagination and beauty. The risk is that his work will be overlooked by the art community. However, those who might dismiss Lin’s projects as populistic—just pretty paintings of flowers—would miss Lin’s essential concern, which is not so much about painting as it is about public space and the role of the contemporary artist in the public sphere. In 2002 he acknowledged that his work had “moved away from the idea of painting as an object” and that he was “more interested in creating a painting as a space to occupy.”
Individual artists can find themselves caug
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Koki Tanaka
Hou HanruCan you describe your generation of Japanese artists? You were born during the mid-1970s and I guess you have a very different outlook to the generation born during the mid-1960s – I’m thinking of artists like Tsuyoshi Ozawa…
Koki Tanaka Midori Matsui, an art critic, questioned why our generation doesn’t touch on ‘bigger’ issues or themes – the older generation, for example, was still struggling with the question: what is ‘Japanese’ art in a global age? She thought that because we grew up during the recession period in Japan we didn’t experience the economic bubble of the 1990s: we never spent a lot of money to produce physically big works. It was quite similar to the art bubble in China of the last ten years: Japanese artists who were active during the 1980s and 90s were making large-format sculptures, paintings or installations. When I was in art school I felt like everything had been done already by great artists. The artworld was somehow already completed. So it’s not just that we grew up in an economic depression; even in art we felt there was nothing we could do.
I was a painting major: in Japan that was the only way to do contemporary art. But even the painting professors encouraged us to do something else. I tried many different thin
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