To be like Water? Exhibiting Artist & Artwork
Monika Lin // River of Plastic
River of Plastic, 2017
Mixed medium installation
240x370cmMonika 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.