Community Hospital Exhibiting Artist & Artwork
Monika Lin // Double Happiness
Double Happiness, 2005 - 2012
Mixed Media Painting - plaster, epoxy resin, polymer paint, and ink.
Double happiness is in part an investigation into the growing trend, internationally, on medication as a means towards psychiatric health. The global psycho-pharmaceutical industry has broadened its reach to include treatment of mild disorders through prescription medication without psychological co-treatment nor placing restrictions on usage, thus creating a society in which individuals are medicated for unregulated and indefinite periods of time rather than encouraged to make the necessary adjustments in order to deal with fluctuating stress in their lives. This institutionalized clinical approach is disturbing in its disregard of individuality as well as in its commerce-driven nature.
“The boom of the pharmaceutical industry has introduced its share of uncertain practices…”
Motivated by financial gain, the pharmaceutical industry has resorted to the same marketing strategies as purveyors of more conventional consumer items. Through television and print media, the industry has created both a false sense of normalcy in the consumption of and an increasingly frantic demand for prescription psychiatric medication. Pharmaceutical advertisements exploit, people’s emotions in the way they frame disease by attaching overly optimistic images to prescription drug therapy, patients can be led to doubt recommendations of exercise, healthy diet, stress management, and other preventative measures. These cheaper, safer, and more effective health measures are unfortunately under represented in the world of advertising.
So convincing are these ads in promoting the attainment of happiness through medication that the issue of self-diagnosis presents itself in an alarming fashion. Increasing numbers of individuals deceived by such promotion now view unthreatening signs of discomfort or poor health as symptomatic of medical conditions that may not exist, thus promoting needless drug consumption and encouraging the over-reliance on drugs to replace healthy life style habits. Coerced and trusting patients demand of their doctors drug treatments based on the perpetuated mis-information, establishing a society of the self-medicated as well as the self-diagnosed.
What one needs to ask oneself is “Why?” Why does society demand our individual and collective compliance to be “Happy”? What does being happy actually mean, what forces are behind the definitions, and what are the implications involved in such coercion.
Central to this body of work is an intention to consider and converse on these themes.
The paintings are composed of tinted plaster replicas of pills gathered from individuals within my immediate community, epoxy resin, polymer paint, and ink. 1AMSA , Focus on Pharm Free.
Monika Lin is an American artist, writer, educator, and curator based in Shanghai. Her work takes a microscope the social, political, and cultural identities that emerge between individuals and communities, and compound at their busy intersections. So much of what you did today came on tacit terms that you never signed-on with. Lin can change that for you.
Lin depicts the liaisons between identity and space, where they root and how they sever. In the repurposing of a neighborhood, the tracts of personal identity that residents once, perhaps unconsciously, defined themselves through, are altered or destroyed. The constant rooting, alienation, and non-containerized transplanting that communities demand of the individuals born among them is a riding theme. She studied Fine Art at the University of California, Santa Barbara, where she studied painting and drawing, as well as printmaking and performance art. Through technical prowess she sneaks her work into traditional canons and the product is as approachable as your own memories. Taking the feminine experience as a granted basis, real quick and casual, her work approaches age and locality as two crossing hairs of an experiential compass. It is worth noting, here, that both Nanjing and Lin’s local Shanghai root into far-reaching, historically matrilineal societies.
Bound to storytelling by her own childhood, she characterizes the relation between identity and place, an ongoing dialogue and swiss replica watches, for example, that tackles the incurious habit of myths and fairytales to tackle other worlds from singular, entrenched viewpoints. From the modern perspective of women and girls parsing through a narrative canon that dodges any trace of their historical precedents. As an artist, Lin educates. Furthering that technique into community practice, she also holds accessible workshops for women and girls to produce stories in a constructive/subversive act of newfound comfort. She is unequivocally going to be the most generous conversationalist you’ve ever met.