Beyond Representationalism: The Performative Materialities and Affective Dimension of Lin Tianmiao’s the Proliferation of Thread Winding

Abstract

This paper reexamines the meanings and values of Lin Tianmiao’s (born 1961) The Proliferation of Thread Winding (1995) through an analysis of its materialities. Lin’s Thread Winding has received much attention in feminist discourse, which tends to draw attention to the symbolic manifestations embedded in the act of winding, and in textiles and domestic objects—techniques and materials often associated with “women’s work” within certain Western feminist critiques of women’s art. This paper moves beyond the gendered lens of interpreting Lin’s art, which has built on symbolic and metaphorical readings of the underlying visual representations, and instead turn to investigate how her work can be understood from the perspective of its discursive materialities, through which the art objects produce material signs (phenomenological effects) that indicate its previous process of art making. Drawing upon new materialist theories and the notion of affect, this paper understands the materialities of Lin’s work as dynamic phenomena, emerging from ongoing intertwining relationships between human and nonhuman agencies. It examines how Lin’s work constitutes a series of inquisitive investigations into multiple processes of making, and how affective qualities and critical knowledge can materialize in and through this process.

Keywords:

• Materiality
• women’s art
• craft
• process
• contemporary Chinese art
• new materialism
• affect
• embodied experience

Notes

Notes

1 The version exhibited at Open Studio, Baofang Hutong 12#, Beijing in 1995 is a bit different from the others, as it included a suspended man’s white trousers made of rice paper, hung from the roof, with another side linking to the floor, intertwining with balls of cotton thread.

2 In contemporary times, the crafting technique has gradually been made obsolete under the rapidly changing social and economic environment in China, where industrial mass-produced objects become everyday necessities.

3 This strategy of installation in a narrow room is only used in Lin’s earliest version, exhibited in 1995. The other, later, versions, such as the one exhibited at Minsheng Museum of Art in 2015 and the one exhibited at the ‘2020+’ exhibition at Red Brick Art Museum in Beijing in 2020 leave more room for the work’s surrounding spaces.

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Yiran Chen

Yiran Chen is a PhD candidate at the Department of History of Art, University of York. Her research focuses on the materialities of Contemporary Chinese Art.

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