Urgent and Indefinite: the method of paradox
Interview with Mi Zhuang
Mizhuang: I’ve noticed that in some of your installations from 2008 and 2009 you used a large amount of film photographs. Is there a certain intent behind this?
Lin: Yes. I really like the texture and material properties of film photographs, especially those that have a bit of age. The passage of time yellows them, warps the colors and damages them. Cracks, folds, fingerprints, stains and moisture change them beyond recognition; moments in time become ashes.
Mizhuang: That’s right. I noticed that you used this particular type of photograph in your installation work “Nobody know I was there , Nobody knows I was not there : Private Memory " . Whose photographs are these?
Lin: These are family photographs, including pictures of my great grandparents, my brothers, my grandparents and my parents’ family members. The photographs span from 1900 to 2000, a century of private photographs.
Mizhuang: I distinctly remember my impressions from seeing this work in the exhibition hall. The exhibition space was very large, and I spotted it from across the room. From afar, my first impression was that it was expansive and poetic, but as I approached it and took in the details, I suddenly tensed up and felt a tingling sensation. I saw all life within those empty outlines, encompassing myself, my family, my sadness and perplexity.
Lin: A photograph is very fragile, yet these fragile carrier bears the weight of infinite meaning.
It is fleeting, yet it serves as the most irrefutable evidence of a certain form of existence;
It is extant evidence, yet it is vanishing evidence;
It affirms a gathering but alludes to parting;
It stores memories and cherishes the past but it also brings injury;
It relieves loneliness and also increases it;
It reminds us of our connections to the past and to others, while also reminding us of the impossibility of connecting with the past and with others;
It chooses our viewing method, yet it does not see our viewing method;
It is touching and yet untouched;
It provides both comfort and discomfort; it is both urgent and indefinite;
It explains the self but is not of the self;
It inserts impossibility and unfamiliarity within the real and familiar; behind that which is not real lays the unobservable truth;
It has powerful virtual authority; it documents and witnesses the ruthlessness of time and the impermanence of life;
It reminds us of the unavoidability of loss, the incurability of suffering; with a sincere profound suffering, it gathers all the scattered people;
Mizhuang: In your work, the paradox formed by ‘presence’ and ‘absence’ gives viewers a powerful mental contrast.
In the work " Nobody knows I was there, Nobody knows I was not there : CCTV News " is from the same series, are the hundreds of photographs from the news?
Lin: Yes, they are all news photographs from CCTV.
I have done much thinking about the concept of ‘news’. One day when I was 30, I was watching the CCTV daily news broadcast, and I suddenly came to the realization that the world does not belong to me, or to anyone for that matter. The world does not and cannot belong to anyone.
In news, there doesn’t have to be any connection between one second and the next. It is in these absurd, seemingly unconnected moments that the world itself becomes connected. If a person’s life is understood through connecting with others, and if this only connection becomes exceedingly strange, then what kind of understanding will result?
Through years of education, Marxism has taught me that human development is inevitable, but every news event I see seems to be completely by chance.
Always at the moment we’re least prepared, the news uses very calm tones to speak of the most terrifying disasters.
This is just like the ruthlessness of life. Who is prepared for the moment when they lose a loved one?
In front of the news, we all become survivors, witnesses to violence, tragedy and disaster. Behind every disaster there is a greater disaster. Each instance of suffering eventually becomes a record of numbers. Every journalist who has reported on a disaster or tragedy moves on to waiting for and discovering the next disaster or tragedy. Who has time to linger on yesterday’s tragedy, even the shocking news from a second ago?
Have you noticed? News reports are so short in every corner of the world, as if the reporters have all undergone the same exact training. It makes us accept tragedy with familiarity, just as we accept celebrations. The news anticipates celebrations and tragedies in the same way, not even placing one before the other. They are watched together by countless viewers before rapidly disappearing, as if they never happened.
Compared to ‘what is happening now’, things like ‘what we have to say’ and ‘what we say’ seem much more important.
Disasters are like culture; they are something we share. This is geography in the truest sense.
Mizhuang: Perhaps our problem is that we don’t know ‘what we have to say’ or even ‘what we can say’.
Lin: Right. On the one hand, it is modern industrial civilization’s endless pursuit of the material, and on the other hand it is the ‘objectification’ of people caused by modern civilization. Materialism has expanded mankind’s interference with the environment beyond its limits, leading to ecological paralysis. The ‘objectification’ of people leads mankind deep into a crisis of meaning.
Massive changes in social ideology and the rise of the internet have led us to separate ‘life’ from the living world. Another side of ‘objectification’ is that it has caused us to separate ‘love’ from the object of our love. Each individual in modern society is haplessly and totally controlled by commercial society, emerging as consumer products which are produced, packaged and sold on a massive scale.
What is the essence of the consumer product? It has been replaced and discarded. Therefore, ‘objectified’ people live in constant fear of ‘falling behind and being discarded’.
Interactions between people have turned into exchanges between objects.
As consumption grows more opulent and diverse, people in an ‘objectified’ society gain more in terms of such factors as self-value, spiritual sense of belonging and sex life, but our emotions grow increasingly empty. Modern civilization and society provide modern people with all kinds of illusory possibilities while misleading them about these possibilities. It provides a consumerist worldview but overturns consumer values. Cruelty can don a glamorous mask, while good intentions get pushed down the road of neglect.
Paradoxes are everywhere.
Mizhuang: That is true. Paradoxes are everywhere. In the installation work " Never Apart ", we see the illusion of coming together and the reality of isolation. Coming together is transient, while isolation is permanent. But the titles take us back to utopia.
Lin: I hope that my artwork can raise issues through paradox and dislocation methods, seeking out the real power of the self’s internal yearnings from the artificial interior of the artwork.
Mizhuang: Let’s return to " Nobody knows I was there, Nobody knows I was not there : CCTV News " . The closest, most central figure in the image is completely empty. It is the ‘self’ in the image, but in actuality, this ‘self’ can be any one of the indistinguishable people in the background. Just as in " Private Memory " , the ‘self’ is not necessarily the artist. Likewise, in the installation work " I want to be with you forever ", the ‘self’ can be the one who is embracing an empty lover, or the empty, embraced ‘self’. ‘You’ can be a person, a country, an object, anything.
Lin: Right. As I see it, art is not about expressing self-experience. This is a very common misconception that people have about art. Art is the thinking that artists reach through their individual experiences. It is a question the artist raises to the self and to the world.
We don’t have to understand our lives or even ourselves, but I think that people must seek out the way in which their lives come together.
By discussing experience, apparently valuable thinking and content that embodies that thought can finally exist independently of the individual.
Mizhuang: During the artistic creation process, and even after the process, what do you think is the connection between you and your artworks?
Lin: At the beginning of the creative process, I have a sense of possession of my expressive methods. It is my ‘object’. It is just like photography to the photographer – it is a hypothetical possession.
The unfolding and implementation of the creation is a process of constantly seeking the appropriate descriptive methods and balance points. Once the descriptive methods and the balance of methods are found, then the artwork is complete; the artwork and its expressive method have been restored to the state of ‘other things’ that are outside of me. I feel that it has become detached from me, and now bears very little connection to me. It needs to connect with the living experiences of other viewers. Though it is something that I created, the audience has no need for pondering how or why I made it. What matters now is how that work affects their individual lives and what thinking it elicits.
The work of art to the artist is like the child to the mother. The child is brought about by the mother, but it does not come for the mother.
Mizhuang: I’ve noticed that your main focus has always been the understanding of life.
Lin: The quest to understand life is more real than culture and it transcends culture, history and politics.
Mizhuang: This reminds me of another of your photographic works, My 365 Days. Though it is presented as a photographic work, I consider it to be a work of performance art. In these diary-style photographs from 365 days we see the hair that comes out of your comb each day, silent yet direct, essential and profound.
Lin: Just a few months ago I was flipping through a magazine and came across a photo essay about families who had lost their children in the Sichuan earthquake and were now pregnant again. They had all had children aged from 8 to 14, but they had died in the earthquake. Now, these mothers harbored new young lives in their swollen bellies. They were no longer young, and looked fragile, weary and tattered, with the calm of someone dealt a heavy blow. They rose up from their tears and prepared to conquer terror and hopelessness with new life.
I found this deeply moving. It is the essence of life.
One day we will lose our loved ones, whether from separation or death. Every life will face this suffering sooner or later, the loss of hope. In the face of life’s brutality, we are all weak and innocent. Our simple attitudes cannot relieve this suffering. But this is an important component of life. To understand brutality is to cherish the life that we still have.
Mizhuang: I was moved in the same way by " Rose Rose ", especially the video segment.
The rose is our life; it undergoes the constantly intertwining splendor and brutality of life.
From your earliest poetry compositions to today’s art, you’ve made quite a leap. I’m curious; can we talk about your childhood? I’d like to understand the experiences that led you to choose poetry. Are there any stories from your childhood that influenced you, that continue to influence you today, influencing your thoughts and your creations?
Lin: Among the various forms of literary expression, poetry is the most versatile and indistinct. It can be fully without logic yet full of rhythm; it can be abstract, even stagnant, but it is free and beyond limitation, full of vast, inexhaustible power.
I really like these qualities. I think that poetry is closest to the soul. It has shown me the true, touching aspect of ‘bounding conception’.
I had a very lonely childhood with almost no friends. I don’t know why. This was especially the case when I was 5, 6 years old, because all of the children near my home were a few years older than me. For children at this age, this is a wide gulf, one that is difficult to cross. Back then I was jealous of all the rowdy boys running about, with their big, boisterous groups, calling out as they charged into one exciting game after another.
Mizhuang: Did you think about joining them?
Lin: Of course I did. I really wanted to, and I tried, but I discovered that the world of boys is a brutal one. For boys, the meaning of violence far surpasses that of anything else. Violence was a part of everyday existence in the 1970s; participation in and the production of violence created glory and satisfaction, and an un-discussed consensus formed around the tacit acceptance of it. This acceptance naturally split people off into rapidly aligning cliques.
In fact, I think that in the 1970s, under a blind and factious mental state, violence was emphasized and fanned to the point of the mundane; violence established a kind of consensus, no matter how illusory. In those times, consensus was most important.
For instance, someone that we all respected passed away, but we established a consensus method for cherishing that person, and this instantly became a lofty, dignified affair. In this atmosphere of consensus, we shed sweet tears, and our shared love for this person became perpetual.
The young me didn’t feel sorrow at all, just an indescribable sense of the sublime.
Consensus is a powerful rationale for violence to become reasonable and legitimate. In consensus, ‘brutality’ and ‘insanity’ become exciting.
Consensus-backed violence is approved, eulogized, worshipped and understood. Consensus-backed violence is legitimate and virtuous, in keeping with emotions and political standpoints.
Violence turns people into ‘objects’; it is the slaughter of ‘objects’ by ‘objects’. Though those ‘objects’ may appear as martyrs or heroes, this cannot change the essential nature of violence.
Mizhuang: These thoughts were also manifested in your 2009 painting series Another Way to Fly. The images featured fighter jets that were built for violence and war, which you covered in beautiful, transparent lace. Is violence bathed in the soft glow of sentimentality still violence? If it is no longer violence, then what is it? What have we made it into?
Lin: The violence here is a metaphor. The discussion of real violence is one aspect. This was more of an exploration of the concepts surrounding violence, the attitudes people have towards violence, even the relationships between modern people. These have all been gradually reduced to a relationship of mutual violence between ‘objectified’ people. This is violence using rather abstract means to continue to embody the consensus of the 1970s in today’s seemingly peaceful world.
None of us want those who were sacrificed in the various forms of violence to call out, like the soldier in J’Accuse, “our sacrifice has been for naught”.
The violence of those boys I knew as a child often played out in my imagination. For a time in my childhood my imaginations and fears of violence became excessive. It was clear that I yearned to join them, but they were very rough with me, especially the youngest boy.
Mizhuang: How old was the youngest boy?
Lin: He was a few months older than me, about my age, but he was the youngest in the group. The oldest boy in the group was two or three years older than him, so this young boy was often also excluded. The older boys would make fun of him, saying that he couldn’t keep up or wasn’t brave enough, so he was under a lot of pressure. He really wanted them to recognize him and see him as part of their group.
I would often secretly follow them. I was very curious about them. I wanted to know everything they were doing, where they were going. When they would discover me, they would stop what they were doing, split up or run off together, taking side streets, jumping over walls or climbing trees to lose me.
Each time they succeeded in losing me was a victory to celebrate. My tears were always accompanied by their cheers from the distance. It made me sad.
Mizhuang: Did it hurt? (Laughs) Was your young soul already wounded?
Lin: I wouldn’t say wounded; at the time I felt that these conflicts were normal. I was the one who chose to spy on them indirectly, shamelessly tailing them. Of course I had to accept the consequences.
I clearly remember this one time where I was following their sounds when the youngest boy jumped out behind me from a tree. He was holding one of those cheap green folding knives that you use to sharpen pencils. He brandished it at me, and with an evil look in his eyes, said some very foul things.
Mizhuang: How did you react?
Lin: I was very angry. I felt that my dignity had been violated. I glared at him, and dared him to repeat it. He immediately repeated it. I got even angrier and dared him to say it again, which he did immediately.
Then I asked if he dared to say it a hundred times.
He was dazed. His mouth moved, but he didn’t make a sound. He put his knife away and ran off without looking back.
Mizhuang: That’s very interesting. What were you thinking?
Lin: I don’t believe it was something I could have really thought out, more of an instinctive reaction. In some impossible way it saved my self-respect and honor, but it also gave me a powerful message – that when you let something become absurd, it will turn into something else, and its qualities and direction are all subject to change. The thing that had dazed that boy actually never really existed. It was a kind of existence that comes from the infinite propagation of reality. Though this infiniteness is not real, it is enough to be absurd. It is a different kind of truth within untruth, the truth of invisible truth, the untruth that overturns truth, the persistence of absurdity. In fearlessness and certainty, it creates power. That boy’s retreat was the retreat of the imagination.
Many years later, I realized that this can be my contemporary art method.
既迫在眉睫，又遥遥无期:悖论的方式
( 林菁菁艺术访谈-米庄)
米庄：我注意到你在2008年和2009年创作的几件装置作品里都大量地用相纸照片，这是有意为之的吗？
林： 对，我非常喜欢相纸照片的质感和材料性，尤其是有了点年头的相纸，岁月的流逝令之发黄，变色，破损，出现裂纹，折痕，留下指纹，污渍，受潮的地方面目全非，片刻之间可化为灰烬。
米庄：对，我注意到你的装置作品《没有人知道我在那，没有人知道我不在那：私人记忆 》中正好使用了这个类型的照片，这些照片都是谁的照片呢？
林：是我本人的家族照片，其中有我的祖父母的父母，兄弟，祖父母，父母的家人和亲戚，时间上我选择的是从1900年一直到2000年，一百年来的私人照片。
米庄：我还很清楚地记得我在展厅看到这件作品的感受，展厅高又开阔，我远远地在展厅的另一头就看见它，第一眼是舒展的，诗意的，到了近处，看见了细节，我有心忽然收紧的感觉，一阵刺痛，我在空洞的轮廓中看到了所有的生命，这其中就有我自己，我的家人，我的悲伤和迷惘。
林：相纸照片非常脆弱，而正是这么一种脆弱的载体，却肩负着无比强大的涵义。
它是存在的证据，也是消失的证据；
它自身朝不保夕，却同时是某种存在最不可辩驳的证据；
它证实相聚，也提示分离；
它储存了记忆，缅怀过去，又带来创伤；
它缓解孤独，也加剧孤独；
它提示我们和过去和他者的联系，也提示我们和过去和他者的不可联系；
它选择我们的观看方式，又无视我们的观看方式；
它既是饱含感染力的，又是无动于衷的；
它同时提供安慰和不安，即迫在眉睫，又遥遥无期；
它说明了我，即非我；
它在真实和熟悉中夹杂着不真实和陌生，它的任何不真实的背后，恰恰是最不被察觉的另一个真实；
它拥有着虚拟的强大的权利，它纪录和见证着时间的残酷，生命的无常；
它提示着消失的不可避免，悲痛的不可治愈，它以一种诚挚而深刻的痛苦聚合了所有分散着的人们。
米庄：你的作品中“在”和“不在”形成的悖论，带给观众巨大的心理落差。
同系列的作品《没有人知道我在那，没有人知道我不再那：中央新闻》中数百张照片都是新闻照片吗？
林：对，全部来自中央电视台的新闻照片。
我仔细思考关于“新闻”的概念，是在我30岁的某一天，我看着CCTV的新闻联播，我忽然意识得世界并不是我的，世界甚至不是我们中任何人的，世界是我们任何人都不拥有，也不可能拥有的。
新闻的前一秒钟和后一秒钟完全可以毫无关联，世界本身就在这种荒诞的看起来不可关联的时间中联系起来，如果一个人的生命是通过和其他人的联系而得到理解，如果这唯一的联系正在变得匪夷所思，那么，我们得到的理解会是什么？
多年受教育，马克思主义告知我，人类的发展是一种必然，而我看到的所有的新闻事件却似乎完全是偶然的。
新闻总在我们没有任何防备的那个时刻，用非常平静的语调，说出最可怕的灾难。
这一点和生命一样残酷，当我们失去我们所爱的人的那一刻，我们中的谁，是有防备的？
在新闻面前，我们都成了幸存者，成了暴力，不幸和灾难的旁观者，每一个灾难后面都有一个更大的灾难，每一次痛苦都逐渐变成对数字的记录，那些报道过灾难和痛苦的记者，已经忙碌地投入到对下一个灾难和痛苦的等待和发现，谁有时间停在昨天的悲伤，哪怕是上一秒种的新闻震撼？
你注意到了吗？在全世界的任何一个角落，新闻的播报都那么简短扼要，仿佛全部的播报员都受过统一的训练，它让我们熟悉地习惯地，象接受庆典一样接受灾难，而新闻本来就把庆典和灾难同等对待，甚至挂上不分排名先后的标志，他们被无数的旁观者共同观看，然后迅速同时地消逝，仿佛从来没有发生过。
比起“什么是正在发生的”，“我们有什么话要说”和“我们说什么”，显然是更重要的。
灾难和文化一样，都是我们共有的，这才是真正意义的地理学。
米庄：我们的问题也许正是不知道 “我们有什么话要说”，也不知道“我们可以说什么”。
林：对，一方面，是现代工业文明的对物质的无休止追求，另一方面，是现代文明对人的“物化”，
物质主义使人类对生态系统的干预力度超出极限，最终导致生态系统的瘫痪，对人的“物化”则使人类深陷意义危机。
由于社会意识形态的巨变，互联网让我们把“生活”和生活的世界分开，“物化“情感中的另一方，让我们把“爱”和爱的对象分开，现代文明中的每个人，都在不由自主地接受商品社会的整体操作，以消费品的面貌出现，被制作，包装，从而最大限度地被出售。
消费品的本质是什么? 是被取代和抛弃，因此，被“物化”的人们不由自主地生活在“接不了轨，跟不上趟，或将被淘汰和抛弃”的恐惧中。
人和人的交往成了“物”和“物”的交换。
一方面生活消耗越来越多样昂贵，人们在互为“物化“的社会中获取自我价值，精神归属，性生活等生命要素， 另一方面，我们的感情越来越空乏，现代文明社会给现代人提供幻想的种种可能性，也误导这种可能性，提供消费世界观，又推翻消费的价值观，冷酷可能带着华丽的面具，善意也可能走向失道寡助的不归路。
处处都是悖论。
米庄：处处是悖论，的确如此，你的装置作品《永不分离》中聚合的幻像和实际的分离，聚的稍纵即逝，离却不可回避，但是作品的标题却把我们带回乌托邦。
林：我希望我的艺术能够以悖论错离的的方式提出问题，从作品中某种人为的不真实的内部，寻找来自生命的“我”的内在渴望的真实的力量。
米庄：我们回到作品《没有人知道我在那，没有人知道我不在那：中央新闻》，作品中离我们最近，处于图片最中心位置的主体人物全是空缺的，是作品中的“我”，但是实际上，“我”也可以是背景中那些成群的辨别不清面容的其中任何一位，和《私人记忆》一样，“我”并不是艺术家这个“我”。同样，装置作品：《我要永远和你在一起》中，“我”可以是拥抱空缺情人的“我”，也可以是被拥抱着的空缺着的“我”，“你”可以是“人”，可以是“国家”，可以是“物”可以是任何一种可能。
林：对，在我看来，艺术并不是为了表达和呈现自我经验，这通常是人们对艺术家的巨大误读，
艺术是艺术家从个体的生存体验中获得的思考，是艺术家向自我，向世界的提问。
我们可以不理解我们的生活，甚至不理解我们自己，但我认为一个人需要去寻找和发现他自己的生命构成方式。
谈论经历，谈论体验，其实是通过经验，让一些看起来有价值的思考和体现思考的内容，能够最终脱离个人而存在。
米庄：那么在艺术创作的过程中甚至之后，你觉得你和作品之间的关系是怎样的？
林：创作初始，我对我的表达方式有一种占有感，它是我的“物”，就像拍摄对于摄影师而言一样，是一种被假设的占有。
创作的展开，实施，是不断寻找恰如其分的陈述方式和最贴切的平衡点的过程，陈述方式和方式平衡点确定，艺术作品完成，作品本身和表达方式都还原为外在于我的“其他物”，我认为它就脱离了我，和我的关联也微乎其微了。它需要更多地和观者的生命体验联系在一起，它虽然是我创造的，但是观者无须揣摩我的“怎么作”和“为何而作”，而关心作品对他的个体生命的影响，以及之引发他个人怎样的思考。
作品之于艺术家，正如孩子之于母亲，孩子可以经由母亲而到来，却不是为了母亲而来。
米庄：对，我发现你的关注点始终是对生命的理解。
林：探讨对生命的理解，比文化更真实，而且超越文化，历史，政治。
米庄：这让我想起你的另外一件摄影作品《我的365天》，虽然呈现的是摄影作品，我认为其实是一件行为作品，日记般拍摄了365天，每天梳头的时候掉落的头发，无声，但是直接、本质，深刻。
林：就在几个月以前，我无意间在一本杂志上，见过一组拍摄汶川大地震丧子家庭再生育孕妇的照片，她们全都有过一个8到14岁的孩子，不幸在地震中遇难，她们隆起的腹部都孕育着另一个幼小的生命，她们都青春不再，都显得那么柔弱，沧桑，疲惫，憔悴，带着重创之后的平静，默默地含着眼泪坚强起来，准备和新生命一起来战胜恐惧和绝望。
这使我非常感动，这就是生命的本质。
我们有一天，会失去我们爱的人，或是分离，或是死亡，所有的生命，都或迟或早终究面对这样的疼痛，将没有柳暗花明；在生命的残酷面前，我们都是脆弱的，无辜的，无奈的，我们简化的态度并不能缓解这样的悲痛，但是，这正好是生命重要的一个组成部分，认识残酷，意味着加倍珍惜我们仍然拥有的生命。
米庄：我在你的《玫瑰 玫瑰》中获得同样的感动，尤其是那段录像。
玫瑰就是我们的生命，它经受的正是生命中不断混杂在一起的炫丽和残酷。
从最早的诗歌写作，一直到你今天的艺术，其中的跨度是相当大的， 我有点好奇，能聊一聊你的童年吗？我想了解，是怎样的经历，让你选择了诗歌写作？或者说，有没有任何童年的故事，曾经影响过你，甚至直到今天，还在影响着你，影响着你的思考，影响着你的创作？
林：诗歌是所有文字表达里最跳跃，最模糊的一种，它可以没有逻辑，但是充满节奏，它可以抽象，甚至静止，但是自由，超越极限，带着永不枯竭，汹涌不已的力量。
非常喜欢它这种特质，我觉得它最靠近心灵，让我看到“跳跃着的观念”的真实而感人的部分。
我有一个特别寂寞的童年，朋友很少，几乎没有，不知道是什么原因， 尤其是5，6岁的时候，住在我家周围的孩子要么比我大2，3 岁，要么比我小2，3 岁，这对一个孩子来说，是很大的鸿沟，很难逾越，那时我非常羡慕那些打打闹闹，奔过来跑过去的男生，他们总是一群一群的，大喊大叫，呼啸着投入一个又一个激动人心的游戏。
米庄： 那你想过加入他们吗？
林： 当然想过，渴望极了，也试过，我发现，男孩的世界其实是很残酷的，暴力对于男孩的意义远胜于任何其他，暴力是70年代的日常存在，参与暴力和制造暴力能造就光荣和满足，它在无需谈论的共识中达到默契，而这种默契，使人和人自然分群，并迅速地亲密地团结到一起。
实际上，我认为在中国的70年代，在一个盲目而分裂的精神状态中，暴力被日常性地强调和煽动，暴力建立起一种共识，尽管可能是幻觉也无关紧要，因为在那个年代，共识才是最重要的。
比如一位我们共同敬爱的人，死去，但是我们建立了共识的方式缅怀死者，这立刻变成一件多么有尊严而高贵的事情，我们在达到共识的气氛里甜蜜地哭泣，我们共同爱着的这个人成为永恒。
幼年的我并没有感到悲伤，我只感到的是不能描述的崇高。
共识也是暴力成为合理合法的强有力的理由，“凶残”和“疯狂”都在共识中变得令人兴奋。
达成共识的暴力是被允许的，被歌颂的，被推崇的，被理解的，达成共识的暴力是合法而且道德的，是符合情感和政治立场的。
暴力也促使人变成“物”，是“物”对“物”的毁灭和屠杀，尽管“物”可能以烈士或者英雄的名义呈现，那也不能改变暴力本身的性质。
米庄：这些思考，我在你2009年的绘画系列作品《 飞翔的另一种方式》中也体现了，画面上是一架架为了暴力和战争而建造的战斗机，你却在画面上蒙上一层透明而且美丽的蕾丝，暴力在闪着温情的淡淡的光芒中，暴力还是暴力吗？如果不再是暴力，那到底是什么，我们究竟让他们成为了什么？
林：对，这里的暴力是一个比喻，谈论真实的暴力是一方面，我其实更多的是在探讨关于暴力的观念，人们面对暴力的态度，甚至是现代人和现代人之间的关系，逐渐简化成相互“物”化之后的暴力关系，这是暴力以相对抽象的方式，在看似和平的今天，继续地体现着70年代的共识。
我们都不愿意，在各种各样的暴力中牺牲的人，就象在法国电影《我控诉》中那位军人喊的那样：“你们全都白白牺牲。”
我童年时认识的那些男孩，他们的暴力，在我这里常常是想象的演示， 我的一部分童年就在对暴力的想象和恐惧中渡过，我希望加入他们“那一伙“的渴望是显而易见的，但是他们对我很粗暴，尤其是他们中最小的男生。
米庄：最小的男生多大？
林： 比我大几个月，基本上和我同龄，但是他是他们那一群里最小的，那群孩子里，大的也大他2，3岁，所以他有时也受排挤，大孩子有时会取笑他，嫌弃他跟不上，不够勇敢等等，所以他也有压力，他特别渴望得到大孩子们的认可，他特别渴望大孩子们认为他和他们是一伙的。
我经常偷偷地跟着他们，我对他们非常好奇，我想知道他们作的任何事情，我也想知道他们都去了哪里，我对他们的追随都在某一个或者一群男生的喝斥中索然而止，或者是他们一起，故意跑得特别快，抄各种小路，翻墙攀树，把我甩掉。
每一次成功地甩掉我，就意味着一个可以共同庆祝的胜利，我的沮丧总是伴随着他们在不远的远处发出的欢呼，总让我心有不甘。
米庄：那你不是很伤心？（笑）是不是幼小的心灵已经受到了伤害？
林：谈不上伤害，那时候觉得这些冲突是正常的，是我自己主动而且不间断地老是偷窥，还无休止地跟踪尾随，自然需要承受任何后果了。
我记得很清楚，有一次，我正寻着声音跑，那个最小的男孩从一棵树的后面跳出来，手里握着一把削铅笔用的小刀，那种薄薄的绿绿的，廉价的简易的折叠小刀，朝我打开着，他非常凶恶地盯着我，说了一句非常恶毒的脏话。
米庄：当时你的反应是什么？
林：我非常愤怒，我觉得我的尊严受到了侵犯，我紧紧地盯着他：你敢再说一遍？
他立刻再说了一遍。我更愤怒了：你敢再说一遍？ 他立刻又说了一遍。
然后我说：你敢再说一百遍？
他一下子楞了，楞过那一瞬那，他动了动嘴唇，什么也没说，收起小刀，头也不回地跑了。
米庄：这很有趣，你当时是怎么想的？
林： 我相信那不是当时可以认真想出来的，是一个直觉的反应，它以不可能的方式，拯救了我的自尊和荣誉，但它给了我一个很强的信息，那就是：当你让某件事情变得荒唐了之后，它会变成另外一个东西，它的性质和方向就都可以改变。实际上，令那个男孩恍惑的东西并不存在，它是现实以无限的方式衍生之后的存在，这样的无限虽然虚拟，但是足以荒诞，它是不真实中的另外一种真实，是无视真实的真实，是颠覆真实的不真实，是对荒诞的坚持，无惧和不容置疑，它就这样产生了力量，那个男孩的退却是想象力的退却。
很多年以后，我仔细地想，这其实就可以是当代艺术的方式。
Color of Memory
Lin Jing jing interview with Mi zhuang (2)
Mizhuang: Your work Color of Memory invited different people to enter into the artwork. Did you have any special criteria for the people you chose?
Lin: The people came from different backgrounds, different professions, different genders and different ages. I asked them the same three questions, all about their most painful memory.
Mizhuang: This is very interesting. You asked them to use a special way of recognizing and transferring their private memories.
Lin: Right. First they transform an abstract memory into a concrete object, then transform it into an abstract color.
Mizhuang: Their answers came to directly form the content and methods of your artwork.
Lin: Right. The narrative and transfer of information was theirs, and then I, as an observer, used the colors they described to paint an “object” that they described as having a close connection to their memory. I rendered and transformed their information.
Mizhuang: I noticed that you intentionally separated the sound and visuals in the narration videos. All of the people recounting their stories alone, when they stare into the camera and slowly speak; it feels calm and real, with no glossing over. The sound of their narratives is stiff; you rendered it into a staccato style, with each word being hammered out one at a time. To be honest, it really hit me.
Lin: Each segment is very severe, sorrowful and hesitant. The pain seems to belong to the speaker, and has been compressed into an unknown corner, where hidden wounds cause constant disruption. But in the recounting of this pain, it gradually separates and exists outside of the speaker, away from the pain of the experience. To recount the past is to create anew. Its realness shocks us, to the point that we almost don’t dare to face its realness. Pain can alter our normally numb state, but it can also make us grow number. This is a paradox. One person grew up under the shadow of his dead older brother. This brother, who he has never seen, perpetually hovers over every road he must cross. In the face of death, he is superfluous, imperfect, unreal. This painful memory has overshadowed him for thirty years, never fading away. When I asked him the second and third questions, he said: a medicine bottle full of pills. White, an extremely pale white. I believe that what shocks you is not the pain itself. Pain is not about individual experiences; it is about natural philosophy.
Mizhuang: Have you compared these different experiences?
Lin: I don’t look for the differences between these painful memories, I look for their commonalities. Extreme pain and grief are often caused by abandonment, sickness and death, or even abstract fear of one of the above, worry about potential danger and its unpredictable arrival. Through recognizing pain, we recognize all life, recognize our shared fears, desires, earnestness, control and balance. We face the fact that fear can never be truly avoided, face the fact that hopelessness can come out of nowhere, face the fact that pain magnifies our fears, doubts and weaknesses.
What matters is not what kind of pain we experienced. What matters is: what does that pain bring us? What does the most frightful pain we experience turn us into? When faced with enormous pain, what do freedom, dignity, even our lives mean?
But, what’s really interesting is that fear has always been a useful weapon in politics and power. Fear can spark unimaginable courage in people. Fear can drive people to die for nonexistent reasons.
Every day is filled with news of violence and disaster, constantly reminding us that sorrow and injustice are unfolding in every corner of the globe. A security-seeking mentality has become the mainstream. Fear has become a public sentiment, and its scope is continuing to expand, while trust is becoming a luxury. There will never be a book that better explains the pressures of modern life than the bestselling I’m Afraid, You’re Afraid: 448 Things to Fear and Why.
The pursuit of “lightning speed” is the goal of modern technology, as well as our spiritual support. New technology has altered our conception of time, our level of patience for processes and our level of caution in trust. In reality, education does not seem interested in these ideas. Today’s education has not effectively connected with today’s world.
Math education shouldn’t only focus on learning arithmetic. It should work to cultivate certain ways of thinking as it explains things. Geography and history shouldn’t be single, separate knowledge systems. Beyond telling young students what is happening and what there is in the world, we need them to learn how to think about what we all face in common. It will no longer be about gaining and accepting knowledge, but about categorizing, organizing and rearranging knowledge. The goal of receiving an education is not to gain knowledge, but to gain freedom through knowledge.
Mizhuang: Your work The Possible of the Impossible brings people who have no connection to art to take part in your artwork. What is your reasoning behind this?
Lin: In today’s so called highly effective life, on the one hand, we pursue speed and quantity. We want everything as fast as possible and as much as possible. We rely too much on objects and technology, while the spiritual side is growing diminished. Truth, sincerity and straightforwardness are tending towards impossibility. The Possible of the Impossible took place in the commercial space of a high end office building. In this space, the audience and I had a very natural (or serendipitous) relationship of influencing and watching each other. For the audience, a rather non-commercial activity is taking place in this commercial space with unclear motives, which is confusing and suspicious. For me, this in itself was my artwork. There’s no transition or boundary between the inside of the artwork and the outside.
Mizhuang: This is very interesting. This transcends the artwork in the normal sense, adding a series of uncertainties to the content. What were the results of the dialogue like?
Lin: To put it precisely, the dialogue is a process, a process of casting doubt, casting doubt on the rationality of everyday life, on the accuracy of accustomed ideas, on reasons for existence, on means of existence, on what is pressing, on what makes us fall silent, on how pressing matters become unimportant, on possible limits. We live in a brutal, heartless world that runs like a massive factory. We must find the possible in the impossible through skepticism.
Mizhuang: To find the possible in the impossible. It sounds quite paradoxical.
Lin: Right. Paradoxes are still what I am most interested in at this stage. Living in today’s paradox-filled world, technology has changed our ways of seeing the world and what we demand of ourselves. In the past, waiting may have led to more profound emotions, more anxiety-inducing ideas, but in this era of technology worship, waiting implies ignorance, backwardness and stupidity. There is now a direct relationship between waiting and anxiety. On one side of the world, the banning of information leads people out into the streets, demanding their right to information. In another corner of the globe, informational overload is increasing numbness and loneliness. Some people are fighting for freedom, while others have sunk into self harm because of too much freedom. Developing countries, facing all manner of difficulties, are struggling to control population growth, while developed countries are seeking emergency measures to respond to shrinking populations.
What are we really fighting for?
Confusion and multiple standards have become the evident traits of our society. In a time when measures of morality are facing constant challenges, how will we come to understand life, history and values, and how will we resist disasters, power structures and apathy? Today’s world is no more tolerant or easy to control than it was centuries ago, even though many people believe that. Our ancestors’ utopia was never realized. Instead, everything has become a commodity, including lies, violence, even death.
Mizhuang: Individual entertainment experiences have replaced philosophies of life to become the explanations of the world. Anxiety comes from the loss of a sense of security, from the uncertainty of existence. Your work …I... is more of a performance piece than an installation. You used corrective tape to cover up every word in books except the word “I”, leaving a bunch of “I’s” scattered randomly around the pages. Why books?
Lin: People always use persistent things to elaborate on transient things. Stones are erected over tombs to bear witness to the occurrence of fragile life. Printed materials are objects that give people material definition by establishing contact and exchange across time and space. Printed material is a testament to the imperative and desire for exchange, while erasure is a simple and rapid method for wiping out information. What printing transmits is a construct, a cultural bridge that establishes contact. It provides standards for judgment. Erasure and the covering of words are also the erasure of standards, the prevention of evaluation, inference and choices about the world, the erasure of the extension of time. It ignores and threatens, destroying trust and understanding, destroying the traces of existence that are decoded through experience, erasing the vigilance of life. It is like old incantations and sorcery accepted in exchange, which silently awaits the always soon-to-arrive prophecy. In this endless waiting, the world becomes an unimaginable thing outside of “I”.
Mizhuang: In these books, the only time is the independence of “I”. The impossibility of connecting between “I” and the world is the source of the sense of panic this work gives me.
Lin: Cutting the connections with the past and the world give us a sense that we no longer exist. Erasing the past leads us to doubt who we are. By turning the environment around us silent, the sounds of distant motors, even the shadows cast by lights in the night become suspicious. The world is silent, and that silence is tight and silent. It makes the endless series of“I’s” that remain appear so sudden, so tangible, solid, heartless, unfamiliar. It binds existence and destruction tightly together, making “I” incomprehensible, even intolerable. But who is it that is intolerable? It is the self that we have never recognized, the information of others that is exposed on ourselves. The term existence does not explain any meaning, but existence is an infinite concept. After erasure it is a lost infinity, a dangerous defense, an insecure security.
Mizhuang: It makes everything appear more impossible. It proposes the most primal questions: who am I? Where am I? Where am I going?
Lin: The quest for survival is instinctual, while confirming the meaning of existence is also an instinct. Our existence is a reason for reaching and entering the future. As we arduously struggle against the ruthless monopoly of disappearance over time, we are also moving into a state of anxious estrangement with the world, of accepting the fear of lost security, of accepting disappearance before it happens, accepting death before it happens, and all of the torment and hardship we have faced become absurd, just like existence.
Mizhuang: In your printed reader, those leftover punctuation marks are reminders, reminders of time that once took place, of time that once passed.
Lin: Right. It reminds us of our inextricable entanglement and instantaneous break with the world, reminds us that after the break, everything is cast out without direction.
If it is a shared history, the break comes from the serendipity of history. If it is a private story, what breaks is the meaning of existence, and within it, much frenzy, anxiety, distraction, bewilderment, emptiness, rage and hysteria as well as sequence, planning, order, unreasonableness, coldness, numbness, brutality and indifference.
Just as flying comes from the fear of falling and climbing comes from the fear of loneliness. We sleep with our bodies curled up in the darkness, unknowingly casting out our embrace in weakness and helplessness.
“I” am silent in the darkness, begging for an explanation in solitude. The erased world, because of the undeniable “I” left behind, is full of a sense of presence. The voice in the void sends out a resounding question, its attitude ambiguous and firm.
It burns in the hesitation, stands solid within the absurdity.
记忆的颜色
林菁菁与米庄艺术对话之二
米庄：你的作品《记忆的颜色》， 邀请了不同的人加入到作品中来，在人群的选择上，有什么特定的选择吗？
林：人选来自不同文化背景，不同职业，不同性别，不同年龄，询问他们完全相同的三个问题，关于所经历的最痛的记忆。
米庄：这很有意思，你要求对方用一种非常的方式来识别和转换他的私人记忆。
林： 对，先是从抽象的记忆转换成具象的实物，然后再转换成抽象的色彩。
米庄：他们的答案直接构成了你的作品创作内容和方式。
林：是的，叙述和信息传递的是他者，作画的却是我这样一个旁观者，我使用了他者描述的色彩，画出与他者叙述的一段记忆紧密关联的’物体”，我对信息进行了处理和转换。
米庄：我注意到你把叙述的录像中影像的部分和声音的部分有意分离，所有正在独自叙述关于伤痛的记忆的人，对着镜头缓慢地叙说，平静，真实，毫无掩饰，叙述者的音频部分，硬生生地，被你处理成一个字一个字敲键而出，说实话，挺震撼我的。
林：每一段看起来都非常诚挚，悲痛，迟疑。伤痛似乎属于陈述者，一度被压缩在某个不为人知的角落，隐藏的创伤曾经带来不得安宁的困扰，但其实伤痛在陈述中，逐渐脱离了陈述者而存在，脱离亲历的触痛，陈述过去是一次对过去的重新创造，它的真实给于我们的触目惊心，使我们几乎不敢正视它的真实，伤痛可以改变我们麻木冷漠的常态， 也可以让我们变得更加冷漠和麻木，这已经是悖论。一个终日生活在他年幼夭折的哥哥的阴影中的孩子，他从未谋面的哥哥无时不刻地停留在任何他需要穿行的道路上，在死亡面前，他是多余的，无法完美的，不真实的，这段伤痛的记忆影响了他30年，仍未退场，他回答我的第二个第三个问题时说：一个装满药片的药瓶子。白色的，非常苍白的白色。我相信，震撼你的并不是伤痛本身，伤痛不是关于个人经验，而是关于自然哲学。
米庄：你比较过这些不同的经历吗？
林：我不寻找每一段伤痛之间的不同，我寻找每一段伤痛中共同的部分，撕心裂肺的疼痛往往来自离弃，疾病，孤独或者死亡，甚至是对于上述种种的抽象恐惧，担心任何潜在的危险和不测的降临。我们通过对伤痛的认识而认识所有的生命，认识我们共同的恐惧，欲望，热诚，节制和平衡，正视恐惧从来不可能被真正躲避，正视绝望可以来自一个寒气逼人的其他地方和任何地方，正视疼痛一度放大了我们的恐惧，疑虑和脆弱。
重要的不是我们经受过什么样的疼痛，重要的是疼痛带来了什么？我们经受过的最可怕的疼痛会使我们成为什么？自由，尊严甚至是我们自己的生命，在面对巨大的疼痛的时候，意味着什么？
但是，有意思的是：恐惧对于政治和强权却从来都是个有力的武器，恐惧可以激发人们产生出不可想象的勇气，恐惧可以鼓动人们为了某种虚拟的理由而出生入死。
关于暴力和灾难的新闻每日铺天盖地，正在不断地提醒我们，悲痛和不公发生在世界的任何角落，寻求保护的心态成为一种主流，恐惧已经而且还在更大范围地成为一种公共情感，信任正在逐渐成为少数人的奢侈品。再也没有比书店里热销《我恐惧，你恐惧，448件为什么需要恐惧的事》（“I’m afraid,you ‘re afraid:448 things to fear and why”）这本书更说明现代人的生活压力了。
追求类似于“闪电的速度”是现代科技的目标，也是我们的精神寄托，新科技改变了我们对时间的观念，对过程的耐心程度，对信任的谨慎程度。现实中，教育似乎对于这些思考是不感兴趣的，今天的教育并没有和今天这个世界有效地联系在一起。
数学的教育不应只是对数理的学习，而是在解题中培养一种思维方式，地理学和历史学，都不该只是单一的分裂的知识体系，除了告诉年轻的学生发生了什么，这个世界有什么，我们还需要他们学会思考我们共同面临的是什么，这将不再是对知识的获取和接受，而是对知识进行分类，排序和重组，受教育的目的并不是获得知识，而是通过知识而获得自由。
米庄：你的作品《不可能之可能》让一部分原本和艺术毫无关联的人，加入到你的作品中来，你这样作的原因是什么？
林： 在今天所谓高效的生活中，一方面，我们追求快和多，最快地得到，最大限度地拥有，我们对物质和科技过分依赖，精神世界反而趋向单薄。真实，诚恳，朴素的东西趋向不可能，《不可能之可能》发生在最繁华的高档写字楼里的商业空间，在这个空间里，观众和我是一个自然地（或者说：偶然地）彼此相互影响互相观望的关系，对观众而言，这个商业空间里正在发生的是一个看起来并不商业的行为，其动机是含混不清的，是令人混淆和怀疑的。对我来说，它本身就是我的作品，它的出现和存在，完全是为了我赋予它的理由，它使个体的创作过程，时时面临来自陌生人断章取义的解读，作品之内和作品之外甚至没有过渡，没有界限。
米庄：这很有意思，这超越了通常意义的作品，它的内容增加了一系列不确定性，那么对话的结果是怎样的？
林：准确地说，对话的过程，是一个质疑的过程，质疑日常生活的合理性，质疑惯常思维的正确性，质疑生存的理由，质疑生存的方式，质疑什么变得紧迫，质疑什么使我们沉默，质疑紧迫如何成为无关紧要，质疑可能性和界限。我们生活在一个残酷的无情的高速运转的如同一个巨大工厂的世界，我们需要在质疑中获得一种不可能之可能。
米庄：获得不可能之可能，听起来非常悖论。
林：对，悖论仍然是我现阶段最感兴趣的题目，生活在这样一个充满悖论的世界，新科技改变了我们的世界观和对自我的要求。我们可能曾经在等待中产生过更深的感情，更牵肠挂肚的思念，在崇拜新科技的时代，等待则意味着无知，落后，和愚蠢，等待和焦虑的联系成正比。地球的一端，信息的禁止使大量冲动的人们涌上街头，申述获取信息的权利，地球的另一处，泛滥的铺天盖地的信息却正在使人们越加麻木和孤独。一部分人在为了得到自由而斗争，另一部分人却因为得到了过多的自由而沉湎于自我伤害，发展中国家在重重困难中强硬地实施对人口生育的控制，发达国家却在为了生育数量的过度降低而探讨紧急方案。
我们究竟需要为何而战？
混淆和多重标准正是我们这个时代的最显著的特征，在道德尺度不断地受到挑战的今天，我们将如何理解生命，历史和价值，如何对抗灾难，权利结构和麻木不仁，我们今天的世界并没有比数百年前更宽容或者更容易控制，尽管多数人是这么相信的，我们的前辈的乌托邦并没有实现，实现的是我们的一切都成为了商品，包括谎言，暴力，甚至是死亡。
米庄：个体娱乐体验代替了生命哲学，成为对世界的解释，焦虑来自安全感的缺失，存在的不确定。你的作品《 …… 我 …… 》，与其说是装置作品，不如称之为行为艺术作品，你用涂改带将书籍中除了“我”以外的文字全都覆盖，只留下东一个西一个，不规则的“我”和标点符号。为什么选择书籍？
林：人们总是以恒久之物诠释易逝之物，坟墓上立着石块见证脆弱生命曾经存在，情人之间以钻石见证爱情的曾经发生，印刷品是人们得以超越时间，空间，而取得联系和交流的物质定义，印刷品见证交流的迫切和渴望，而涂抹，则是迅速消灭证据的简单的方式，印刷传递的是一种建构，人为的建立其联系的文化桥梁，它提供一种判断标准，涂抹和覆盖文字，也是在涂抹标准，阻止对世界的评判，推测，选择，涂抹时间的延续，漠视和威胁，摧毁信任和理解，涂抹经由经验解读发生过的生存痕迹，涂抹生命的警觉，如同已经接受了兑现了的古老的咒言和巫术，而静默地等待永远即将到来的预言，在无尽的等待中，世界成为一个置身于“我”之外的不可想像。
米庄：这些书籍之中，唯一的时间是“我”的孤立，我和世界的不可联系，这也许是作品使我感到恐慌的原因。
林：割裂和过去和世界的联系，使我们感到自身的不复存在，涂抹掉过去，使我们怀疑我们是谁。它可以使我们周遭的安静，遥远的马达声，甚至是夜色中灯光投射落下的阴影都变得令人狐疑，世界沉默，而沉默是紧密而坚实的，它使这些剩下的一个又一个“我”，显得那么突兀，触目，生硬，绝情，陌生，它使存在和毁灭紧紧地捆绑在一起，它使“我”变得不可理解，甚至不可容忍，那么，我们不可容忍的是谁？是我们从未认识过的自己，还是我们身上流露出来的他者的信息。存在这个词汇并没有解释任何意义，但是存在是个无限的概念，涂抹后的书籍是迷失的无限，是危险的守护，是不安的安全。
米庄：它使一切看起来更加不可能，它提出了最原始的问题，那就是：我是谁？我为什么在这里？我在哪儿？我要去哪儿？
林：求生是一种本能，确认生存的意义也是一种本能，我们的存在是达到和进入未来的理由，我们可能在艰辛地抵挡消逝对时间的无情垄断地同时，走向焦虑的与世界的不相知，对失去安全感的恐惧的接受，在消逝之前接受消逝，在死亡之前死亡，曾经受到过的煎熬和磨难和存在一样成为荒唐。
米庄：你的印刷读本中，那些残留的标点符号，是一种提示，提示曾经发生，过往的时间。
林：对，提示我们和世界的纠缠不清和瞬间断裂，提示来龙去脉变得面目全非，提示倾注一掷在断裂之后成了毫无方向。
如果是一段公共历史，断裂就来自历史的偶然性，如果是私人故事，断裂的就是生存的意义，其中不乏疯狂，焦虑，恍惚，迷乱，虚无，愤怒，歇斯底里，同时又是次序的，计划的，有条不紊的，无理的，冷漠的，麻木的，残酷的，无动于衷的。
如同飞翔来自对坠落的恐惧，登高来自对孤独的恐慌，黑暗中，我们倦曲身体而眠，无意中在孱弱和无奈中给出一个拥抱。
“我”在“空了的空间里静默着，孤独地乞求解释，涂抹而去的世界因为剩下之“我”的不可否定，而充满现场感，空洞的声音却发出了洪亮的提问，态度是如此地含糊而坚定。
在迟疑中燃烧，在荒谬之中坚定不移。
Tate Interview LIN JINGJING 林菁菁
Monica Merlin -Lin Jingjing
Lin Jingjing employs varied media including video, photography and performance to explore notions of social and personal identity in the context of modern society. Her works often concern the nature of paradox and depart from a philosophical interest in the human experience.
Lin Jingjing
Image courtesy of the artist
Monica Merlin: As I am researching Chinese women artists, I thought it would be useful to talk directly to the artists. It has been a delight to know that everyone is very happy to be interviewed.
Lin Jingjing: Your approach is quite unique. To be honest, hardly anyone pays much attention to women artists or tries to understand the situation they face in China. Sometimes there are exhibitions of female artists, but they do not really shed any light on anything. The curator simply puts together artworks by women artists without drawing anything meaningful connections between their works. It is all very superficial, so I do not take part in those type of exhibitions. It would be more interesting if they were to look at how things are for women artists from a historical or social perspective. For example, it would be interesting to look at what effect a woman’s gender has had on her, what space is available to her in this society, and why she makes the art she does. But it is strange to think that you should be included in a particular exhibition just because you are a woman. I am not saying I am completely unwilling to take part in an exhibition of women artists, but that it should be a show that has some kind of meaning behind it. So I really like your research topic, since it explores real issues. I am happy to support you.
Monica Merlin: Do you think that by arranging these exhibitions, the curators just want to give women artists a space to exhibit their art, or do you think they have another agenda?
Lin Jingjing: My sense is that there are not many people who are actually considering what women artists are thinking about – why they make their art, and what is special about their work. These are important questions, but nobody really pays them much attention. Instead, curators are just looking for a theme for their exhibitions. It is similar to a person who, when buying shoes, says, ‘I normally wear leather shoes, so this time I should get some cloth shoes instead’. You are only buying the cloth shoes because you normally get leather shoes, not because you think the cloth shoes are really comfortable. Do you see what I mean? If you say to someone, ‘I am a woman artist’, they might reply by saying, ‘Ah, great, we are putting on an exhibition of women artists soon’. They can simply invite you to take part in the exhibition without having seen your art or having a clue about what you do. It is really strange, and completely meaningless.
Monica Merlin: Do you think, generally speaking, that women artists in China face difficulties in finding opportunities to exhibit their works?
Lin Jingjing: Yes, great difficulties.
Monica Merlin: Have you faced these difficulties yourself?
Lin Jingjing: Of course, very often. Sometimes when people organise an exhibition, they might decide to include a few women artists, not because their works provide a contrast to the exhibition as a whole, or match the theme, but because it would be a bit unbalanced if the exhibition consists of all male artists. In most cases, this is the reason the curator includes women artists. Also, male artists are generally very unwilling to talk about art with female artists. They are far more willing to talk about other things, like the clothes you are wearing. This is something I often joke about with other women artists. Often at an exhibition opening, male artists would sit around talking about art, but when they start talking to women artists, they’ll change the conversation to something different.
Monica Merlin: Do they think that you do not understand art because you are a woman, or do they think that the art you make is trivial?
Lin Jingjing: I think they do not feel any need to talk about art with women artists. It is not a conscious choice, it is just the way their mind works. They are just not used to doing it.
Monica Merlin: Do you think that this behaviour is related to traditional views of women?
Lin Jingjing: It is part of their ideas about a woman’s identity. For example, say that you are in a restaurant with your friends having a conversation about culture. And in your group of friends there is someone who is a housekeeper, or a waiter, someone whom you have never talked about culture or art with. When you see them, you would still be very polite, but you would talk to them about other things, such as the weather and clothes – anything but culture. That is because in your mind, there is no need to talk to them about culture. This is how I think it works. Male artists see themselves as playing a different role when talking to female artists, a role in which talking about art does not feature. It is very strange. But of course, I am talking in general terms here – it is not as if every male artist is like this. But on a social level, this is a serious issue. And there are also many other causes behind this problem – I am not saying that men are the only ones responsible for this.
Moreover, this issue is not limited to the art world; it applies to society in general. Modern society generally treats women as a commodity. When your television gets old, you buy a new one. And when you buy any other commodity, you ask yourself a range of questions: Is it easy to use? Does it look nice? Is it in fashion? How much does it cost? This is the way society treats women. Just look at all those fashion magazines that teach you how to be a ‘charming woman’, how to manage your family, how to change yourself in this way or that, how to succeed, how to get a good boyfriend, how to keep your boyfriend, how to put on makeup and look nice… all this stuff. This is all part of a society’s education of women. From girls to grown women, they are always regarded as a commodity. The most important aspect of a commodity, of course, is that it can be replaced. So the problem is not just with one person or one group, but the entire society.
Even women themselves are affected. They think that they should behave in certain ways, or that their most important task is to make themselves look beautiful through plastic surgery and the like. They believe that if they are able to find a man, they will have won the whole world. They treat themselves as commodities. Since the entire society is pushing in this direction, nobody thinks that there is any problem. But female identity is a real issue. It has been present for many years across the whole world, not just in China, Japan or Korea. It is as present on this broad scale as it is in the smaller world of Chinese women artists.
Nowadays, I get the impression that women artists are treated with more importance in the West, partly because people realise that women artists think about things and do things in a different way, which deserves recognition. Another reason might be that people in the West have seen a lot of male artists and they now fancy a change of taste. It is just like what we say in Chinese, ‘thirty years to the east of the river, thirty years to the west’. Compared to the West, the situation in China is a bit trickier. The issues inherent to Chinese society’s views on women are deep-rooted, making them much harder to change.
Monica Merlin: Do you think that feminism requires greater attention in China?
Lin Jingjing: I think it is not quite that simple. I think that feminist issues are part of a greater issue of identity. For example, we have a Women’s Day on 8 March in China, but there is no Men’s Day. It is analogous to the way in which newspapers and online media glorify people for returning someone’s lost wallet. If incidents like this make the media, it means that very few people would actually carry them out, as they become something ‘special’. So the fact that we have a day specially designated as Women’s Day shows that women’s identity has never been given much importance: something special has to be invented to make up for the lack of importance with which women are treated. So I see this as a very dangerous message. It shows how serious the situation is.
Monica Merlin: I agree that there are very complex issues related to women artists in China. By focussing on women in my research, I of course do not want to marginalise them, but aim to understand them and provide them with a space to express their thoughts. But as you just said, this can actually be quite dangerous, as it could lead to isolation. How do you think this problem can be resolved in the future?
Lin Jingjing: It is a strange problem. In fact, if you have a society in which more attention is given to women, feminism becomes less important. It is precisely because so little attention is paid to women that feminism is so important. But on the other hand, if feminism did not exist at all, there would be even less attention for women. It is a paradox.
Monica Merlin: What are your own thoughts on feminism?
Lin Jingjing: For me, feminism is relevant when it is about being able to do things as a woman that can have an effect on others. Feminism becomes meaningless when your actions have no effect whatsoever and you are just trying to use the fact that you are a woman to make what you are doing seem really important. This type of feminism is utterly useless, because all you can do is just shout slogans like ‘women should be equal’. It can never achieve any result, because you have nothing substantive to talk about.
So I think people need to focus more on the way in which women do things, or the ways in which women do things that surpass gender, since many things are completely unrelated to gender. For example, everyone will one day lose the person they love the most, or the person who loves you the most will lose you. This is an unchangeable fact, part of the cruelty of life. This is not a women’s nor a man’s issue: it is a problem that every person must face. So if you can forget about gender completely when talking about issues like this you would discover that you approach these topics simply as a human being. In cases like this, it seems too narrow to talk about feminism, and equality between men and women. It is meaningless. So I think that any meaningful work requires a solid foundation: you need to be doing things, thinking about things, raising questions, and producing outputs. For an artist, whether male or female, these are the important things. It is frankly just strange if you demand attention without this foundation.
Again, in many cases a paradox emerges. It is very difficult to simply say, ‘this should be done’, ‘that must happen’, or even say what inequality is. If you treat yourself as a commodity, then who are you to complain that you are repressed? Who are you to say what inequality is? I think that we as women need to face our own problems too, and look at what we are doing ourselves before we tackle problems of equality or opportunity.
Monica Merlin: Do you feel that many women in your life are willing to treat themselves as commodities, or subconsciously fit into a stereotype?
Lin Jingjing: This is connected to the influence of society as a whole. There is a constant stream of magazines, television shows and voices telling you how to behave, so people are being pushed into these stereotypes. Sometimes, people are pushed into situations they did not choose, and they have no way out. A lot of these issues are not as simple as someone choosing to be a certain way. To truly solve these problems, society as a whole needs to change, especially in our attitude towards women and how we educate about gender.
Monica Merlin: It is immediately apparent when looking at your work that you have a great interest in memory and many of your works deal with it as a theme. Could you talk about your thoughts on memory, and why you think it is important?
Lin Jingjing: I think that one’s personal growth, and the type of person one becomes, are both related to one’s experience. You are gradually shaped into the person you are through the accumulated sum of your experiences. The same principle also applies to the history of a country: the national memories of each decade shape each generation of people. These things influence you in ways that cannot be seen. I gradually became interested in these invisible things – what they are, and how they affect and change people.
I also came to notice an interesting phenomenon among my acquaintances. If a person had been hurt badly, or had gone through a difficult time, he or she would become more forgiving, understanding, calm, and willing to help others. They would also become less selfish, and keener to spend their time on meaningful things. But if someone had a smooth time growing up, and was lucky enough that everything was easy and perfect for them, they would often turn out to be selfish, unable to understand others, and lacking in sympathy. Their attitude towards the world was often one in which they were always asking the world for something, rather than giving something back to the world. When I realised how important people’s experiences were in shaping who they became, I became very interested in thinking about many other invisible things that influence people.
The first thing I came up with was education, the second was family. The third thing was our experiences, what has happened to us in our emotional lives. Later on, I found that these were all connected to pain, and so started work on the series of paintings Colour of Memory. I talked to a lot of people face to face, asking them three questions. Firstly, I asked them what the most painful memory in their life was. Some people would answer straight away, but most would tell a story after a short pause. Secondly, I asked them to tell me about an object connected to this memory. People would reply, for instance, a cup, an alarm clock, or a movement. Finally, I asked them what colour they would choose to represent this memory. People said things like ‘definitely red’, or ‘blue’, or ‘greyish’.
After I asked this question, I told them that the exercise was over and we could talk about other things, but some people would continue talking about the questions, trying to explain why they had chosen a specific colour for their memory. I think that when people answer my three questions, they went through a process of transferring: the first question asks for a memory, which is abstract; the second question asks for an object, which is concrete; and the final question asks for a colour, which is again abstract. So people were asked to mentally transfer something from abstract to something concrete, and then back to something abstract. They had never thought about what colour their memory was, or what object they connected it with, so I got many interesting answers.
These conversations also had a profound impact on me. When someone I invited to take part sat down, he or she had no idea what I was going to ask. Similarly, I had no idea what they would say to me. I knew these questions were quite weighty, so I was worried about how they would react, whether they would be sad, angry, or resistant. For the person answering the questions, he or she had no idea what I was about ask. So both the person asking and the person answering were in a slightly uneasy position, it was very paradoxical.
Later, I painted their chosen objects in their chosen colours. All the objects are very mundane, but the colours strongly contrast each other – the paintings look very colourful when they are put side by side. I had no control over either the colour or the object, and I was not involved in the stories they told me, but I was the one who put them on display. There are many strange and ineffable connections in this world, and in this case I created things that were not connected to me at all. I gave their stories expression, but they still belonged to them. But again, though the memories are theirs, they had never transferred them to any object or colour before, so their answers were a surprise for them too. It was me who pushed them to come up with specific objects and colours. So you see there are many paradoxical connections in this work, which I think very clearly express the state of people’s relationships in today’s society – people form relationships with each other in a way that is totally inexplicable.
Another paradox is that the objects are all very mundane things that everyone has, but when they are painted in colour and placed in a series, they become very beautiful. It is also hard to imagine that these colourful and familiar objects are linked to someone’s most painful memory.
When I started making this work, I brought along a video camera to film people talking, because in the beginning I planned to include a painting component and a video component. My plan was that I would show the video of the actual person speaking, but remove their voice to mask their identity, displaying their words as text somewhere else so you would not know who said what. I also wanted to have a video area where you could watch everyone speaking but not hear them, and find out what they said in another area with the paintings and the text. I was also going to play the sound of a typewriter in the exhibition venue. I planned it this way because I did not want it to become a documentary work, because it would be uninteresting.
However, after working on it for a while, I decided not to include the video component, because after talking with so many people, I realised that the pain does not belong to any particular person – it is shared by all of us. The pain they felt individually is caused by some important factors common to everyone. For example, we all need to feel respected, we all need love, we all need a sense of achievement, and we all need confirmation of our identity. These things have nothing to do with gender, cultural background, age, or profession: we all face the same problems, and we all need the same things. In this sense, one person’s pain is everyone’s pain, and everyone’s pain is our own pain. Pain is something we all have in common. If you look at it from this perspective, there seems to be another paradox – these problems may appear to be personal, but they are in fact universal.
This work had a great effect on me, and moved me more than I had imagined. It was really touching to listen to people tell me about their pain, not because I enjoyed listening to the stories themselves, but because of my realisation that we had so much in common. Even though we are unrelated, we are the same. Because this work had such a major effect on me, I resolved that all my works in future should be similar in nature, focusing on the things you can’t see, and the things that everyone has to face. The world’s problems are my problems.
Some artists are particularly concerned with the environment, AIDS, feminism or other issues. What I came to realise is that in our society, whether in China or elsewhere in the world, we rarely pay much attention to (or take much action concerning) the mental difficulties people face. We are often completely unprepared for coping with things that cause us pain. For example, when children start going to school, what their teachers, parents, and older friends teach them is all part of a training course on how to survive. Nobody ever tells them how to cope with mental difficulties, pain, or the loss of a loved one. All this is simply left blank. Everybody in every generation experiences these mental difficulties, but we do not have any methods for dealing with them. Everybody is left alone to confront these problems, to cope with painful situations without any training, preparation, or help. You might not even have the chance to tell anyone else about it.
This means that everybody, every living being, is facing these situations for the first time without any experience. You can’t pass on your experience to someone else, or give them a helping hand, and you can’t avoid the pain. Everyone has to go through it. So I started to think about what we could do about this. I was talking about it with some friends, and they thought that actually there was nothing we could do, since we lacked the appropriate experience. I think that in a situation like this, where we think that there is no answer and nothing that we can do, it is even more necessary to at least ask what we can do. It might seem like a paradox, but it really is the way things are. We can’t stop asking the question just because we have not found the answer. If there really is no answer, or the answer is impossible, then there is even more of a need to keep asking the question.
Some of my works have really changed my attitude to the world, and influenced the type of work that I chose to do. These are important issues, and even if art cannot provide the answer, I think that there is a great need for it to keep posing the question. Even though art has not given me any answers, it has helped me to think about these issues in greater depth, and prompted others to think about these issues too. As for when the answer will come, that is something beyond our control. I often joke that though we can’t control what will happen, we can control what we do now.
Monica Merlin: So you are saying that in most circumstances in life, we are quite alone.
Lin Jingjing: If you look at the life of an individual, this is the case. Think about this: your grandmother might have faced the same problems your mother faced, but she could not give any advice to your mother; similarly, you and your mother might face the same problems, yet she would not be able to help you either. So you all need to face those problems alone. You feel really sad when you think about the way these problems repeat themselves, since so few people are working on solving them. We are always avoiding such problems, unwilling to discuss them. I think that people are unwilling because these problems are so incredibly present – they have always been with us, and every one of us must face them. It is easier to talk about more trivial things, or other people’s problems. We are so enthusiastic about other people’s problems, but become reticent when it comes to problems concerning ourselves. It is a very strange way of thinking.
Monica Merlin: I think many of your art works are connected to what you have been talking about. Some appear on the surface to be about love or marriage, but actually deal more with loneliness and the struggle for identity.
Lin Jingjing: I guess you are talking about I Want to Be with You Forever. There is a lot of misunderstanding about this work. I took photographs of 300 couples, and cut out the women in all of them, leaving the men embracing an empty space. This work explores issues of female identity: the title is I Want to Be with You Forever, but what ‘you’ refers to remains unknown. You have already decided to be with someone even though you do not know their identity. This might be strange and paradoxical, but it is also a very common issue that occurs every day.
However, the most important aspect of this work has nothing to do with either women or love. The ‘you’ in the title could be anything: it could be an object, a country, a relationship, or anything else you want. It conveys a desperate, emotional need to hold onto something, to possess something. You might not even care what it is, all you know is that because your own identity has been lost, you need to clutch this other thing in order to provide yourself with a sense of security.
Even though this work borrows the language of love, the real question it poses is completely unrelated to love: it raises issues of identity and insecurity. People believe that no matter what this ‘you’ stands for, they will be happy and safe as long as they have it. But in reality, such a thing just does not exist. For example, some people think that once they have a house, they will be happy, but it does not work like this. Once you have something you will soon forget about it, because these things are completely unable to resolve your insecurities or bring you happiness. So the title I Want to Be with You Forever represents the idea of replacement, expressing this paradox.
Another work of mine is called Never Apart. It is made from pocket-sized mirrors, which open up like a book to reveal two mirrors facing each other. I placed a photograph of a kissing couple on one side, and cut out one person to put on the other side. If you hold the mirrors at just the right angle, you can see the couple kissing each other. But it does not work if the angle is even slightly off. Like I Want to Be with You Forever, this work appears to be about love, but actually has nothing to do with love. It is more about how far people are from the things that they yearn after.
The title also expresses a paradox: though it says the couple are ‘never apart’, they are actually always apart, or are at best only connected weakly. This observation is not limited to the relationship between men and women, but applies to all kinds of relationships between people, between people and society, and between people and objects. It is all the same. Our hearts desire to be never apart from those things, but it is just not possible.
I find these paradoxical things really interesting, and I am always trying to find them. Once I find a paradox, I then try to use it to explore different questions. I try to push people to think about these questions, as they are questions that we can’t otherwise bear to discuss. I remember when I Want to Be with You Forever was exhibited, women generally liked it, but men found it disturbing. The difference between the two reactions was really interesting.
Monica Merlin: In your work, you often employ a mix of media, such as installation, performance, and painting. Could you talk about the work titled I?
Lin Jingjing: Like I said, I am really interested in paradoxes in a range of situations, and I consciously seek them out. One day when I was reading, I realised that when people read printed things – like books, newspapers, and magazines – they tend to readily believe whatever is written; they give a lot of credibility to the printed materials. Typed materials are questioned less than those written by hand. So printed materials do not just represent one type of writing, they have a special power to make people believe in them.
Also, I noticed that in modern society, the place you want to go is often the opposite of the place you end up arriving at. I chose the title I to reflect the way in which modern society encourages everybody to make themselves special and different from everyone else. Society says that you are able to succeed or do special things because you are special and different. So it seems that the society encourages one to put oneself first.
In the books that make up the work, I erased all the text apart from the words, ‘I’, ‘me’, and so on. Sometimes, a page would be totally blank apart from the punctuation marks. It looks really strange! If you read a whole book like this, you would get really confused and lost. I wanted to use these books to explore a particular issue: if you concentrate so much on ‘I’ that you erase its connections to the world and to other people, then the ‘I’ is left very prominent but utterly lost. You can’t recognise the ‘I’ since you do not know how it relates to other things. So by trying to make yourself special and strengthen your identity, you end up in the opposite place and lose your identity. It is another paradox.
The work is not just about the self either. There are many similar situations. For example, nowadays we depend more and more on machines, but as a result we have also lost many things; some people spend all their energy on making money, but lose time with their family. Society is full of situations in which you intend to go in one direction but end up going in the completely opposite way. I wanted to use the books as an example to explore this paradox.
I made several different versions of this work. In China, I used Chinese books, and got some students to erase the words. Later, I made a Spanish version in Chile. I reserved nine old desks at the National Library, and got nine people to do the erasing. I do not speak Spanish, but I found out that in Spanish there are two words for ‘I’ – ‘yo’ and ‘mi’. I think the words sound really nice! So I slightly tweaked the performance, getting the people at the desks to say ‘yo’ and ‘mi’ out loud when they encountered the words in the books. Later, I also did a German version of the work in Cologne.
When I exhibited the work in Philadelphia, it was just after Obama’s election, and I wanted to make an English version using one of his campaign speeches. But it was all a bit rushed, and I could not find the text in time. It is a shame, since it would have worked really well with the ‘I’ erased from the many ‘I-will-do-this’ and ‘I-will-do-that’ promises contained in the speech. It would have been fascinating to exhibit one of Obama’s speeches in America with only the ‘I’ left. Unfortunately, I never ended up doing it, because at the time I had arranged to exhibit a different work, and there was no time to accommodate the changes. But I have kept the idea as a proposal. It is another work about paradoxes.
Lin Jingjing
Rose Rose 2011
Image courtesy of the artist
Monica Merlin: Could you talk about your works Rose Rose and I Want to Fly?
Lin Jingjing: The thing that I find interesting about roses as a flower is that they have thorns. While the thorns are there to protect the flower, this protection only works to an extent. There are a lot of analogous situations in real life: people set up defences to protect themselves, but do they actually work? That is why I think roses are special and why I chose to use them in this work. Again, some people think the roses speak about love, but I chose it really for their thorns and the paradox of self-protection they embody.
When the flower blooms, it is already on its way towards death. So you might think that if you stitch it up before it blooms, you can stop it from dying. But of course this is impossible in reality! So although the intention for stitching the flowers is to save them, the result is actually their destruction. This is another paradox, since it is unclear whether you are protecting or damaging the flower. It is quite paradoxical, and I like that.
That is the initial impetus behind this work. Later, I wanted to get a close-up view of the stitching, which is why the photographs are so large. This way you can see the detail very clearly. When I was doing the stitching, I noticed that the colour of the petals where the needle had pierced them was slightly darker, like a wound. So the flower is very weak, just like life. The visual effect of the close-ups is therefore very strong and striking.
Once, during an exhibition, I saw a woman of about thirty or forty start crying in front of one of the photographs. I thought this was odd, and asked her what had prompted this reaction. She said that she hadn’t come for the exhibition, in fact, she had never been to an exhibition before in her life and did not like contemporary art, museums, or anything similar. She was just waiting for a friend around the corner, and had popped in the exhibition to pass the time. When she saw the stitching in the rose, she realised that this was exactly what she had done to her daughter. Because she wanted her daughter to have a good future, every day she made her do things that she hated and which made her unhappy. The realisation made her really sad, so she started to cry. This left a profound impression on me, as I had never thought that anyone would think about the work in this way. When I first made the work, it was about life, but she prompted me to think more about it.
Later, I made a series of six videos. There were eight photographs originally. The videos were very simple, just one hand cupping a rose and another hand stitching it. I then slowed it down significantly so that you could see the needle breaking through the flower more clearly. When the movement of the needle breaking the flower becomes so slow, the sense of pain is heightened. The speed really changes things.
I have a friend who plays rock music, who came to see this work and really liked it. My friend said that it was an excellent illustration of the extreme violence in our society. This told me that different people approach a work differently and expand its meaning. I was not that aware of this until I talked about this work with others.
That started me thinking. Though I had made both photographs and videos in the Rose Rose series, there was still something that I wanted to express but felt that it hadn’t come across very well. So I started writing and thinking about what else I could do. I then hit upon the idea of staging a live performance. I invited other people to perform it, because rather than viewing the performance as something I would do for other people to watch, it would be something for the performers to do and experience themselves. So all the performances are performed by other people. I do not think there is any point in me performing – it does not represent anything. But if someone else performs the piece, they will be affected, and this will pass onto the audience. I think this is more interesting.
Lin Jingjing
Rose Rose 2011
Image courtesy of the artist
Later, the National Museum of Chile invited me to hold an exhibition, so I wrote a proposal. The original plan was to hold a solo exhibition in one of their venues in the capital Santiago for one and a half months, and then to move to Concepción for another one and a half months. I proposed a performance of Rose Rose, requesting for over 3,000 fresh large pink roses, and asking local people to do the red stitching. It was really tricky, as they needed to get the right type of roses from North America. But in the end we did it. The performance was made up of people stitching the 3,000 roses in the venue. When they were all sewn up, they were left in the gallery for a month and a half, during which the roses started to shrink and change in colour, making the stitching more prominent.
The proposal was submitted to the National Museum of Chile in Santiago, and the curator replied by saying that while they loved the proposal, they wanted to hold the exhibition in Concepción instead of Santiago. Concepción is Chile’s second city, and was once considered as a potential capital city. It is a very cultured city with many writers and musicians, and its residents are very proud to live there. They look down on Santiago somewhat. But Concepción was the epicentre of an 8.9 magnitude earthquake in February 2010, and it lost many of its residents. People there are still suffering from the pain of this disaster, so the curator thought that the performance would be perfect if it were done in Concepción. I agreed, and so we changed the location to Concepción.
The performance was done in two spaces separated by a wall, but there was access from the front and back. People were sewing up the roses in the first space, and they could walk over to the second space – which was lit with a theatre light – to put the roses down, stand around, or embrace the people who came in. We stood in front of this area while they performed.
We had roughly planned the performance times in advance. While all this was going on, a man from the audience who could speak some English came up to me. I told him to place the roses on the floor with the stitching facing upwards next time he came back to this space. I had spoken very quietly, so I did not know how much he actually understood, but he nodded and went back to the first space. I kept watching him to see what would happen. When he placed the third rose on the floor of the second space, everyone began putting their roses down on either side, gradually forming a pathway with all the stitching faced upwards. We ended up with a twisting path of roses in the second space, and all the people followed this path one by one out of the space. Nobody had told them what to do. The performance ended when the last person walked out of the space, at which point everyone clapped.
It was so beautiful, and so powerful. Everyone there was crying. It was so moving and played out so much better than what I had originally planned. Yet, its success was not down to the fact it was my idea; it was because everyone there was themselves and contributed their power to the performance. It was a very touching performance and it had a very profound effect on me. I think that everyone has power, and if you can find a way to express it, this power can be really strong, beautiful and simply amazing. I realised that this is exactly what I want to do with my art. When everyone was crying, there was no need to talk: you understood everything without words.
After the performance was over, the work became an installation. When we were planning where it would go in the gallery, the museum said that I should write a short summary of the exhibitions that my work had been featured in. But I said I would not write anything. I wanted the visitors to forget everything about the artist, to forget that it was my work. Instead, I wanted them to see the artwork by itself, to remember that it was something that the performers did themselves.
I was very pleased with this decision, as everyone who came in had a perfect experience. I remember there were two women, both housewives over sixty. They had no idea about art, and when an usher invited them to come in, they said that they could not because they did not understand art, and were not feeling well. The usher then told them not to worry about coughing, and just to be themselves. When they went in, they were absolutely perfect. There is a photo of them – all their movements were great. I think this anecdote is related more to life than to art: it is about being yourself and expressing your own power to the full, rather than being a performer or an actor. This is something I really like.
That was a moment when I realised what a great potential art has. These things have all gradually changed the way I make art. You should go about it with the understanding that if some things really moved you, it would move other people as well – perhaps not everyone, but many of us are similar on a basic level. Our emotional needs are all very similar. This is why I am really interested in the type of power that reaches beyond culture and turns people into simple individuals regardless of their culture, background, profession, age, or gender.
Later, the curator of a Sino-Italian biennale in Milan asked me to give a performance at the opening ceremony after seeing my work in Chile. This was held outdoors, on the grass. Given that Italy is so different from Chile, I did not want to do the same performance again. I ended up recruiting a lot of volunteers to take part in the performance. When I met them on the first day, I told them to forget about the performance being my work and just to concentrate on being themselves. I asked them to sew up the roses and then hold onto as many as they could with both hands. Then I asked them to stand on one leg on the grass. On the day, the weather was perfect, very sunny, and the grass was very green. The volunteers were all wearing white tops and black on their lower bodies, and so the combination of green, white, black, and pink looked absolutely beautiful – it was a very relaxing scene to watch.
The performance was designed to be thirty minutes long. When it started, the performers were all standing still on one leg, and everyone in the audience wondered what would happen, and whether the performers were just going to stand there the whole time. After a few minutes, someone fell over because he could not stand up on one leg any longer. I told them to try their hardest, both mentally and physically, to stay standing up until it just was not possible any longer. Their hands kept drooping down from the weight of the flowers. After a while, their bodies started shaking and trembling in an attempt to keep the balance. You saw these minor changes in their bodies before they finally fell over. After another few minutes, you saw them falling over one after one.
After the full thirty minutes, only four people were left, and they were shaking constantly. So despite its simplicity, the performance was still powerful. It was very beautiful, and at the same time very cruel. Though this performance was different from the one in Chile, people’s reactions at the venue were also very interesting. I talked to the performers after it was finished, and they told me that they had been deeply moved by the experience. The power of the performance came from them, not from me. My work just made it possible for them to express their power. I really like this type of empowerment.
I am now planning to stage performances in Hong Kong and New York. In Hong Kong I want to hold a performance on the escalator that goes up the mountain in the residential area called Mid-Levels. It is like one you find in a shopping centre, but this one leads up to a mountain instead. I want to ask some of Hong Kong’s many Filipino housekeepers to take part in it. They will wear white and black clothes while holding the roses, and go up the escalator. It is a very long escalator going up in several sections. There is a staircase beside the escalator for descending, so the people coming down the stairs would see all the performers coming up the escalator in small and large groups.
Monica Merlin: Did you choose to ask Filipino housekeepers because of the recent typhoon?
Lin Jingjing: Not at all. The culture in Hong Kong is quite odd. Many families employ a Filipino maid. The main income in the Philippines consists of remittances from all the Filipino women working as maids overseas. The identity of these women has been completely lost – they do not have a home of their own and live with their employers. This means they do not have anywhere to go on weekends, so you can see many of them sit around in the parks.
Monica Merlin: But now, given what happened in the Philippines with the typhoon, I think that the work could be even more moving for them. It would give them space to think about the fragility of life, just like your work in Concepción.
Lin Jingjing: I have not thought about that, but that is true. The escalator moves very slowly. So if you imagine coming down the stairs and seeing all these people standing in silence, coming up the escalator, I think it would be pretty powerful. The slow speed of the escalator also creates a type of confusion between reality and dream.
I am also planning a performance in May next year in Manhattan. Since the streets and avenues in Manhattan are all numbered, I would like to get several hundred people to stand at every junction. People would stand in their places from, say, two in the afternoon for forty-five minutes, holding a handful of stitched roses. Then after the time is up they could all go on their respective ways. Just imagine how nice it would be to come out of the subway in Manhattan to find someone carrying these roses at each and every junction.
Monica Merlin: Would they have to stitch the roses themselves?
Lin Jingjing: Yes, they would stitch them at home first. Then they would arrive at their places at the set time, say at two in the afternoon, and just stand there for forty-five minutes before going their own way.
Monica Merlin: Is there any angle from which you could see all of them?
Lin Jingjing: I do not know. It is not in the plan. The performance itself is very still and quiet, but movement comes in when they leave. It is also paradoxical. It is a very powerful thing to stand still holding the stitched flowers. I would like to do different performances in different cities, adjusting each performance to react to the city. When I have done all the performances, they can become a themed work as a whole. This work can represent a whole range of meanings. In New York, for example, it speaks about the great trauma created by the 9/11 incident.
The difficulties facing humanity are not experienced by one individual, one country, or any one group; they are universal problems we all face. That is the reason I want to hold performances in all these different locations. I also think it is important to get the local people to perform the work. It is fascinating to see that the act of performing actually had an effect on the performers. They might have never thought that such a simple thing could represent anything, but in fact there are many ways in which the work can connect and relate to their own experiences and identity.
Monica Merlin: Could you talk briefly about I Want to Fly?
Lin Jingjing: This is another work about paradox. The sewn figures in the photographs are empty, and slightly protruding. They exist in between presence and absence. Their wish is to fly away, but the stitching keeps them firmly to where they are, hence the paradox.
Monica Merlin: Do you sometimes feel like you want to fly away to somewhere else?
Lin Jingjing: It is not about me. I think that the ‘I’ in I Want to Fly stands for anyone, all the people who view the work.
Monica Merlin: But I am asking about you. Do you feel like you want to fly away?
Lin Jingjing: Sometimes, yes! But more importantly, it is about the current state of China. At one stage, people in China felt that America was their future, that America’s today is China’s tomorrow. They thought that they should copy the Americans in everything they did so that they could have happy lives. But now, I think people are starting to realise that perhaps America is not our future after all, that it has many problems of its own, problems different from ours. So now people are wondering where our future lies. The whole of society wants to leave poverty behind for a better life and a better environment like those in America. In the most extreme cases, they want to cut all ties with the culture of the past. The Cultural Revolution also played a part in cutting off the past from the present. People think that if they leave China’s past behind, they will be closer to their American dream life. But as your country gradually develops, you come to realise that this is not possible, that you cannot cut off the past so easily. I Want to Fly points out that you cannot actually fly away, and you cannot abandon your history and culture. This is the paradox I wanted to explore in the work.
Another aspect of the work is the material used: cotton is very light, but the theme of the work is very weighty. This is also a paradox – I am crazy about paradoxes! The material itself is not important to me; I was just looking for a way in which to express this paradox. The work is not about cotton, in the same way that Rose Rose is not about roses.
Monica Merlin: Thank you so much for such an interesting interview.
Monica Merlin interviewed Lin Jingjing in her studio in Caochangdi, Beijing on 14 November 2013.
Published 20 March 2018
Existential Beauty: The Art of Lin Jingjing
by Richard Vine
“I” am silent in the darkness, begging for an explanation in solitude.
—Lin Jingjing
Contemporary Chinese art made its initial impact, both at home and abroad, through methods that were surprising and galvanizing but far from subtle: Big Face painting, shocking live performance, large-scale anecdotal sculpture, bizarre staged photography, and irreverent video.
This bold esthetic, which would have been a jolt to any culture, was particularly unsettling in a land steeped in refined ink-wash painting and quiet contemplative poetry.
Once the post-Mao Opening Up policy took hold, two forms of brash visual rhetoric—Cultural Revolution propaganda and Western-style advertising—seemed to merge in the insouciant art of post-Opening China.
The later waves of Chinese avant-garde artists, those who have come of age since 1990, in the new era of rising prosperity and social liberalization, know little of a shared political trauma or a common cause. For them, dizzying change and dislocation—physical, social, psychological—are the prevailing issues, and their artistic responses have proved as diverse, as atomistic, as their individual experiences. Women artists in particular, affected by Western feminism but wary of formal doctrines and group activities, have tended to center their work on private sources and concerns.
Lin Jingjing, who did graduate study at the Central Academy of Fine Arts, has contributed notably to this discourse, embracing femininity without resorting to either sentimentality or lasciviousness. In paintings, altered objects and installations, she addresses some of the most wrenching themes imaginable—death, loss, loneliness, betrayal—with a remarkable sophistication and restraint, even at times a touch of humor.
Dresses (2006-09), for example, features a variety of white shifts, variously embellished with cotton balls and lace, displayed against flat lacey backgrounds punctuated by grids of round photo portals. Some of the garments are innocently girlish, some more alluring, and some customized to blatantly evoke female genitalia.
The multiple photos, identical in each case, range from rose blossoms with their petals surgically stitched together to shots of a hyper-realistic sex doll in provocative poses.
The interplay of virginal and erotic elements bespeaks not only the dualistic nature of marriage but the larger paradox of femininity itself—at once elevated and degraded, purified and reviled, worshiped and subjugated.
A desire to escape the low and mundane seems to animate the departed figures in the photo installation I Want to Fly (2006-08).
To create the effect, Lin asked individuals to jump energetically while she photographed them from a low angle.
She then juxtaposed the cutout shape of each leaping figure, seemingly stitched or bandaged into place, against street scenes or construction-site images.
Some of the resulting pictures were mounted on suspended heart-shaped hand mirrors with wings, reinforcing the Baudelairean impetus to transcend self-reflection and pass n’importe où hors de ce monde (“anywhere out of this world”).
But there is clearly a downside to this wish.
To be ourselves, Lin’s missing persons imply, we must be free to define our own goals and fulfill our own nature.
Yet how can we, as human beings, fulfill ourselves except through connections, however onerous?
Even the smallest social unit, the couple, is subject to this dilemma.
For Never Apart (2009), Lin cut one figure out of each of several bride-and-groom photos and inserted them on opposing inner surfaces of rectangular compacts. Here, to be “open” means to be apart; the spouses are together—or almost so—only in the darkness of the closed case.
The 300-unit "I Want to be with You Forever" (2008-09) separates the marital pairs even more poignantly—one (almost always the man) embracing a partner-shaped void on the surface of a toy bed, while the absent mate hovers perpetually on the canopy overhead.
At the heart of the human condition, Lin suggests, lies an unfulfilled longing—a quest for genuine connection that inevitably, given the self-contradictions of human nature, translates into a vacillation between solitude and ritualized but imperfect union.
Beyond the romantic pair lies the family and society—equally necessary, equally encumbering, equally flawed. Lin’s most complex examination of this problem, the series “Nobody Knows I Was There, Nobody Knows I Was Not There,” so far encompasses three related bodies of work.
Private Memories (2009) is a traditional Chinese medicine chest with 90 drawers, each now devoted not to herbs or other medicinal substances but to extended-family photographs from roughly the last 100 years.
The yellowing images—depicting parents, grandparents, distant aunts, uncles, cousins, etc.—lie tenderly on beds of cotton, implying a respect for “precious” blood ties and the collective past. Yet every figure has been literally defaced—its visage cut out, leaving a hole.
This act of intimate vandalism, rendering the individuals anonymous, is Lin’s mildly shocking way of reminding us that families are constituted largely of roles that persist across time and historical circumstance, regardless of who plays the parts in turn.
Each drawer contains, in effect, a treatment for illusion. Just as medicine works in like fashion on every person, no matter who they are, we all serve as father, mother, brother, etc., in fundamentally similar ways. In the end, only those conventions remain; no potion can cure death or prevent the annihilation of personal memory.
CCTV News (2008) explores public roles from the same disabused perspective. Small metal boxes, their lids emblazoned with multiple Coca-Cola logos, bear stitched-on photos of organized group events—meetings, concerts, calisthenics, political rallies—with the myriad participants clearly shown but the leader cut out, leaving only a ghostly void. This evokes not only the shadowy nature of much official leadership but also the loss of self that is entailed, for followers and directors alike, once strict social organization comes into play.
The news, we are reminded, is often a montage of such scenes, conceptually disjunctive and recounted in an eerily dispassionate “professional” manner, while Coke and other mass-market products reign increasingly over the distribution of vital information.
Such, too, is the import of Public Memories (2011), the third component of “Nobody Knows I was there ,Nobody know I was not there . . . ,” in which a wide variety of photographic scenes from the past and present (including dance presentations, group portraits, award ceremonies, airplane boardings and exits, key movie moments, and colloquies ranging from intimate to diplomatic) are cast in bright monochrome colors, with selected faces and figures stitched over.
The sewing creates a partial erasure of that character on the recto side and a thread silhouette on the blank verso. The simple device makes a telling point: in groups and daily situations, the self is somewhat eradicated; yet without these interactions, one feels meaningless and adrift.
The vulnerability of that self is most movingly represented by the stitched-together blossoms highlighted in the photographic suite " Rose Rose" (2008-09).
The flowers, traditionally associated with women and romance, are shown singly in close-up or as bouquets jammed into garments and shoes, the long green stems evoking lower bodies and legs. The tender pink petals, meanwhile, recall skin—provocative when bursting from openings in the clothes, delicate when seen at close range knit together with sutures. Opening flowers often represent nubile women and their vaginas, while wilting flowers stand for the transience of life. But Lin offers something new: blossoms sewn together as though in the hope of recovery, thus emblemizing the wounds that flesh and soul alike are heir to.
In the installation Insecure Security (2011)—the title seems to summarize Lin’s take on human relationships—real threads, as red and attenuated as blood vessels, hold together pieces of white clothing or fill the interiors of ornate white slippers. The very ties that unite us, it seems, may also limit our growth.
That idea is explored in great depth and detail in the ongoing project Color of Memory (2010-). The end product may be a series of paintings and wall texts, but the essence of this work resides in its process. Lin asks various people to tell her three things: their single most painful memory, the object they associate with it, and the color that the memory brings to mind. She then makes a deliberately crude monochrome painting of the object in the color specified, and exhibits it with a text transcribing the Q&A between subject and artist. Everything about the project is memorable—the candor of the participants, the emotional rawness of their recollections, the aptness of their object and color choices, the dreamlike power of Lin’s renderings.
The stories are heartbreaking: a woman who loses her three-year-old daughter forever at a shopping mall; a medical student who watches a patient die on the operating table under the hands of a skilled surgeon; a wife who receives a letter from her husband’s pregnant girlfriend, and responds by terminating her own pregnancy and her marriage. In Lin’s world, we are all damaged flowers—holding ourselves together by force of will, hoping to transcend grief, beautiful in our fragile persistence.
In the recent performance installation I (2011), the artist invited participants to sit with books and patiently cover all the text, line by line, with white correction tape, leaving only the punctuation and the word “I.” This “correction,” an erasure of all that describes, defines, qualifies, enriches, and contextualizes the self, results in hauntingly minimal volumes. The pages are as white as marble slabs; language is reduced to the cogito (the “I” of Descartes’s “I think; therefore I am”) and a few vestiges (periods, commas, quotation marks, etc.) of its former situation, its contingency, in a vanished physical and conceptual milieu.
In existentialist terms, the world is composed entirely of the “I” and the “not-I,” pure consciousness and brute things, the self and the Other. Yet there is, and can be, no pure intellection; every thought is a thought about something. And the most disturbing, most challenging something is another mind.
The loss of family and friends, imprisonment, illness, political repression—all these and more tend to isolate us (a fact that makes this work exceptionally effective across cultures). But always we find around us the lingering signs of other subjectivities, other judgments and desires, other plans. So long as we live, the “I” will ceaselessly wrangle with history and the conflicting wishes of others. The push-pull of interacting wills—sometimes contending, sometimes cooperating—continues without pause, until death brings obliteration, a perfect nothingness.
Lin Jingjing’s contribution to contemporary Chinese art is thus two-fold. She couples a focus on individual experience (in what has for centuries been a collectivist culture) with art-making of unassuming skill. The amalgam generates a distinct form of beauty—existentialism melded with subdued artistry, and permeated with simple human care. In short, Lin’s vision is compassionate, transcultural, and mature.
(Richard Vine : Managing Editor of "Art in America" Magazine)
美之所在：林菁菁的艺术
—Richard Vine
“我”在“空了的空间里静默着，孤独地乞求解释
---林菁菁
放大的面孔、惊世骇俗的行为表演、巨大的雕塑、诡异的场景摄影与匪夷所思的影像作品，中国当代艺术就这样借由离奇的创作手段为国内外所知。
这些大胆的、让任何文化都为之一颤的美学实践，在这块曾经浸润在静默诗意与细腻丹青的国度异常活跃。后毛泽东时代的改革开放政策得以让两种不同形态的视觉修辞——文革宣传画和西式广告，融合于后开放时代漫不经心的中国美术。
伴随着经济增长和社会开放，上世纪九十年代兴起的中国前卫艺术家，对这片土地所经历的政治创伤及其原由知之甚少。那些应接不暇的变化和社会、物质与心理的异位才是他们急切需要面对的问题，由此产生的艺术实践也是丰富多样、切合他们个体经验的。
尤其是女性艺术家，她们受到西方女性主义的影响，但由于对群体创作与理论教条保持着警惕，她们的创作多以私密空间和个人焦虑为母题。
林菁菁，毕业于中央美术学院研究生院，用不同于伤感与性的表述方式参与到女性主义话语当中。
她的绘画、经过改造后的现成品装置，将那些极其痛苦的题材：死亡、失去、孤独与背叛，表述得非常精致、而且有节制，甚至带着一丝幽默。
作品《物语》 (2006-09)由多件白色的衣裙组成，上面用蕾丝花边和各式各样的棉花球做装饰，这些丝质衣裙展示在画面中心，作品用纵横平铺的圆形小图片为背景。
其中一些非常纯真、非常女性化，一些则明显设计得让人联想到女性生殖器官。
这些小图片，大小统一，有的是缝合的玫瑰花骨朵，有的是质感真实的性玩偶摆出的挑逗姿态；贞洁与色情的相互作用影射了婚姻中的二元性，同时更大程度上体现了女性自身所蕴涵的矛盾与复杂：升华与贬值、纯洁与玷污、被追随与被征服。
在照片装置作品《我要去远飞》（2006-2008）当中，一股想逃脱世俗的欲望似乎控制着照片装置作品中那些展开双臂的人形。
照片的拍摄过程中，林菁菁要求被拍摄的个体充满活力地一跃，同时在较低的拍摄角度，抓下跃起的一瞬间。然后，将这些个体跳跃的瞬间并置在一起，用缝合的方式将它们固定在有街道和建筑工地背景前面。
这个系列，也有部分图片缝合在悬起的心型镜子上，再配以翅膀，给人以波德莱尔式的自我升华以及穿越这个世界之外的任何地方的诗意。
显然地，这些作品有其悲观的一面。
那些被镂空的人型，隐含着一层意味：为了做好我们自己，我们必须能自由定义自己的目标与自我意愿的满足。
然而作为人类，除了通过周边各种关联性来实现自我满足外，还有什么更好的途径呢？
就连夫妻这种最小的社会单元也面临这样的难题。
在《永不分离》（2009）中，林菁菁将情人的亲密照中的一方镂空剪下，并把它装裱在一个小长方型镜盒里与被镂空的照片遥相呼印。
在这里“开放”意味着分离，这些情侣只会在盒子关闭之后的黑暗中，才能得以相聚。
《我要永远和你在一起》（2008-09）用一种更有深刻意味的方式将三百对夫妻们分开：其中一方，以男性为主，在袖珍玩具床上拥抱被镂空的妻子形状，而妻子的图片则永久地悬于袖珍床的顶棚上。
林菁菁提出的人类境遇的核心是一种永远无法被满足的渴求。
人们渴求真诚关联性的同时又避免不了撞见人性中的自我矛盾，作品中这些夫妻被叙述为一种在独立与仪式化之间摇摆不定，形成不完美的结合。
家庭与社会提供比浪漫情侣更深层次更丰富的思考维度，它们具有同样重要的存在必要性、同时也都充满瑕疵、步履为艰。
《没有人知道我在那，没有人知道我不在那》是林菁菁对家庭与社会这一复杂问题的一次审视，这个系列目前由三件相互关联的作品组成：
《私人记忆》（2009）是一组由九十个抽屉组合而成的中国传统中药抽屉柜，里面装有黑白的家庭照片，横跨一百年的时间。
发黄的相纸上是艺术家自己的曾祖父母、父母、表亲、叔叔与侄子的照片。
这些照片被轻轻地搁在柔软的棉花上，显出血缘关系的珍贵和对集体记忆的尊重。
所有家庭照片中的人物面孔都被剪去，留下一个空洞。
通过这种小心翼翼的破坏行为，基于个体匿名状态的再创造，林菁菁用一种温和但却震撼的方式提醒我们：家庭是生活在各个历史时期的人们所组成，可能是一个人在不同辈分之间的角色转换。
每一个抽屉内所承载的内容可以看作是对一个幻想所下的药方。
就如药对不同的人有着同样的效果，无论照片中的人物是谁，我们都基本承载着彼此相似的多种角色，父亲、母亲、兄弟等等。 最终，只有这些角色的形骸留下，没有什么能治愈死亡，或阻隔个人记忆的泯灭。
作品《新闻记忆》（2008）用同样的角度对公共人物角色进行审视。
在多个印满了可口可乐商标的金属盒子上出现多个正式场面，有会议、音乐会、运动会、政治集会等场面。
在密密麻麻人群中有一个核心人物的形象被镂空，留下幽灵般的空洞。
这件作品以一种警示的视角来打开我们对于“公共人物”的理解。
作品中的被镂空的核心人物形象不仅暗示了公众领袖的虚无，同时影射了无论是从众还是领袖，一旦进入到严格的组织形态中，内心自我即迷失。
作品也提示我们习以为常的新闻节目将各种事件堆砌在一起，以一种职业化冷静姿态播报出来的时候，无形中已经被批量生产的商品，例如可口可乐，越来越多地将真正重要信息传播所掩盖。
作为《没有人知道我在那，没有人知道我不在那》系列的第三部分，《公共记忆》（2011）也有类似的意味。该作品由大量的摄影场景组成，从舞蹈表演、合影、颁奖仪式、登机和出仓到经典电影镜头等组成，场景的选取从公众到私密。
艺术家用明亮的单色调覆盖画面，有的照片中的人物面孔被缝补过。
缝补让人物在正面看上去模糊了，而在反面呈现一个线勾勒的轮廓。
这样简单的设计展开了作品的内容：在日常或群体的互动过程中，自我基本上是被抹杀的，然而没有了这些互动关系，人们又会觉得没有意义或随波逐流。
自我的脆弱本质在《玫瑰玫瑰》（2008-09）这件以摄影为媒介的系列中得到了非常生动的体现。
作品中被缝合的玫瑰有的单独一朵，有的则整把挤在礼服或者鞋子里面，长长的绿色花枝让人联想到下半身和腿。
柔软的粉色花苞让人联想到肌肤，在衣服中含苞待放，挑起欲望。
走近细看才能注意到每朵花苞上面的缝合口。
玫瑰是女性和爱情的典型象征物，盛放的玫瑰通常代表富有性感的女性和她们的性器官，枯萎的玫瑰则被喻作生命的短暂。
林菁菁则给出一个新的比喻：被缝合的花苞虽然预示着康复，同时也象征着肉体和精神上不可抹去的痕迹。
装置作品《安全的不安》 （2011）的标题看似在总结林菁菁关于人与人之间关系的理解：红线上渐弱的红色就像血管，将白色的布连在一起或者填满装饰华丽的白拖鞋。那些看起来维系我们之间的线，也可能成为限制我们成长的牵绊。
在《记忆的颜色》（2010-）中，林菁菁对这个概念做了细致深入的探索。
林菁菁让人们回答她三个问题：自己最痛苦的记忆，与这段记忆相连的物件，可以描述这段记忆的颜色。
然后她用述说者描述的颜色绘制与述说者记忆相联系的物件，展出绘画作品的时候同时配有对话的文字。
这个项目仍未结束，最终的作品形态可能是一系列绘画和墙上的文字，但是这件作品的关键在于它的过程。
参与者的率真，回朔记忆期间所灌注的感情经验，以及他们所选物品和颜色，与林菁菁的梦幻般的创作手法结合使《记忆的颜色》成为一件耐人寻味的作品。
有的故事很让人心碎：在购物中心丢失自己三岁女儿的妈妈；一位医学学生看着一位患者死在一个医术高超的医生的手术台上；一位已有身孕的妻子收到她丈夫已经怀孕的另一位女友的信，她以终止自己的妊娠与这段婚姻做出答复。
在林菁菁的世界中，我们都是受伤的花，以强大的内心力量缝合自己的伤口，脆弱的坚持格外美丽。
在最新的行为装置《我》（2011）中，艺术家邀请参与者坐下来将书上的句子一行行用修正带覆盖，只留下标点符号和“我”字。这个“修正”过程抹去了所有描写、定义、资格、润色以及上下文关系。
剩下的是幽灵一般的无字书，书面色彩如汉白玉般洁白，语言只剩下“我思故我在”，以及少量的关于抹去之前的状态、偶然性的痕迹（逗号、句号和引号等等），这些痕迹存在于消失殆尽的物理和观念当中。
用存在主义的话说，世界完全有“我”和“非我”组成，纯意识和最原始的，自己和他者。然而没有，也不可能有纯粹的意识活动；每一次思考都是对“某种东西”的一种思想。最令人不安也是最具挑战性的这种“东西”，是另一个人的思想。
失去家庭和朋友、监禁、疾病、政治镇压，这些东西会割裂／孤立我们（正是这个事实让她的作品在不同文化中都能引起广泛的共鸣）。
但是经常会在我们周围发现其他的主观性、判断和欲望在游离。在我们有生之年，“我”会不停地与历史、相冲突的意愿以及生命中的其它相纠缠。相互作用的意愿，持续不停滴时而相斥，时而合作，直到死亡带来最后的审判将所有定格。
这样，林菁菁对中国当代艺术的贡献在两个方面：她聚焦于个人经验（在一个集体主义盛行几个世纪的文化氛围当中），以并不张扬的艺术创作手法。这两方面糅合出一种独特的美感-存在主义与内敛的艺术创造结合，渗入简单的人文关照。
简而言之，林菁菁的艺术是富有同情心的、跨文化的和成熟的。
（本文作者 Richard Vine 系《艺术在美国》杂志主编）
Color of Memory
记忆的颜色
--- what is your most painful memory?
I once had an older brother who died of an illness at the age of six. For many years, my mother was unable to escape the shadows of this tragedy. She placed his picture in every corner of the house, and spoke often of every little detail of his life. Though I was also her son, I would never be perfect enough. For a long time, I was an ignored replacement. The boy in the picture was timeless and perfect, but I, here in reality, was a disappointment, full of unacceptable shortcomings.
Because of this, my relationship with my mother was full of tension and unease. Many years later I realized I was constantly trying to please her, striving to approach her standards and become what she liked. I couldn’t even face the real me. This also affected my attitude towards the people around me. I tried to please them just as I tried to please my mother, seeking out security, love and friendship through pleasing people. This is the most painful part of my memories. It led to depression and a pain that lasted for thirty years.
--- If that memory could be transformed into an object ,what would it be ?
A pill bottle full of pills.
--- What color would you use to describe this memory?
White, an extremely desolate white
--- what is your most painful memory?
About seven or eight years ago, when I found out that my girlfriend’s former boyfriend was diagnosed with HIV, I went to the hospital to get tested. The test results took several months to come back. Those months were a time of fear and pain.
--- If that memory could be transformed into an object ,what would it be ?
A bed
--- what color would you use to describe this memory?
Green, deep, dark green, the color of olives
--- What is your most painful memory?
When I was twelve, I was sexually assaulted.
I ran home to tell my mother.
I remember she was ironing clothes at the time.
I told her what happened,
including some details I didn’t want to tell,
what that man had told me,
what he had done to me…
He was an old friend of my parents.
The whole time I was telling her this,
she never stopped ironing clothes,
and never looked up at me.
At the end, she told me,
coldly: sometimes children misunderstand the actions and words of adults.
When it happened, I didn’t feel like I had been hurt,
but many years later I finally realized that
this was my most painful memory.
--- If that memory could be transformed into an object ,what would it be ?
An iron
--- What color would you use to describe this memory?
Grey, like the color of dust
--- What is your most painful memory?
Fifteen years ago,
I took my three year old daughter shopping at the mall.
I spotted a pink one piece dress, which I had her try on.
It fit her well, and looked really pretty on her.
So I went to the register about ten meters away to pay for it. She was in front of the mirror, trying out various poses.
She was only out of my sight for two minutes, and I figured that she was still at the mirror.
But after I paid and came back, she was gone.
She had vanished.
I rushed madly through the mall looking for her. All of the mall employees helped me look for her, but I couldn’t find her.
For the first 5 or 6 years, I couldn’t believe it.
I always fantasized that she would suddenly pop out from behind a corner, looking exactly as she did that day.
--- If that memory could be transformed into an object ,what would it be ?
A small one piece dress with embroidered edges. It’s beautiful.
--- What color would you use to describe this memory?
Pink, the color of that dress.
--- What is your most painful memory?
My most painful memory is a dream I had. I dreamt that my father died, and in that dream, I was full of grief, and I woke up in pain. My father lived with me at the time, and when I woke up, I did something surprising. I walked to the room where my father was sleeping, quietly bent over, and checked to see if he was breathing. I didn’t calm down until I knew he was breathing normally. I wasn’t happy, just calm. I sat there in his room for about half an hour and then left.
--- If that memory could be transformed into an object ,what would it be ?
A face.
--- What color would you use to describe this memory?
Blue, like the color of a clear sky.
--- What is your most painful memory?
My father died in a car crash when I was six.
My mother was a homemaker, and we had always lived off of my father’s income. At the time, I had a four year old sister and a two year old brother.
My mother grabbed some luggage and took us to live
at the house of my uncle, my father’s younger brother.
But his wife kicked us out, and we had nowhere to go.
My mother led the three of us as we wandered the streets.
I saw a feather on the street, and I picked it up.
When I did that, my mother ran up to me in a crazed frenzy, snatched the feather out of my hand and threw it on the ground. I cried.
Years later, when I recalled this, I realized that it was a very painful memory.
I will never forget my mother’s face that day, so full of despair.
--- If that memory could be transformed into an object ,what would it be ?
A feather.
--- what color would you use to describe this memory?
Yellow, an old, mournful, deep yellow.
--- What is your most painful memory?
My first boyfriend left me for another girl.
It was very painful.
I saw them sitting together in the park, and that girl was leaning in close to him.
I felt like my heart had shattered.
I returned to my dorm room alone, and stared at a bright light bulb deep into the night.
When I finally closed my eyes, I thought I had gone blind.
The next day, my vision had seriously deteriorated.
The eye doctor said he had never seen anything like this in his 20 years of practice.
--- If that memory could be transformed into an object ,what would it be ?
A light bulb.
--- What color would you use to describe this memory?
Green, a yellowish-green shimmering with yellow sparks.
--- What is your most painful memory?
During my college internship,
my teacher asked me to assist him in a surgery.
At first, the surgery was rather relaxed.
My teacher was working with so much ease, and I was full of respect for him.
About halfway through the surgery, the patient’s breathing grew short, and we immediately went into rescue mode.
I saw the patient’s heart stop, and my hands begin to shake.
After what seemed like a century, my teacher dropped his scalpel.
A living, breathing life had ended in a blink of the eye.
It turned out that there isn’t much distance between life and death.
After that, I decided to change my profession.
--- If that memory could be transformed into an object ,what would it be ?
A scalpel
--- What color would you use to describe this memory?
Blue
--- What is your most painful memory?
One day ten years ago, I received a letter frommy husband’s lover, she told me she waspregnant with my husband’s child.She begged me to divorce my husband for thesake of her unborn child. I just got pregnant at that time, and in angerI went to the hospital and got an abortion alone. My husband was in absolute denial,but we were divorced anyway. Our trust was completely destroyed.Even till today I still don’t know whetherthe letter was true or not,but that is not important anymore. I have been single ever since,it’s been ten years,but I still think I can not move on from this pain.
--- If that memory could be transformed into an object ,what would it be ?
Typewriter, the letter was typed out by a typewriter.
--- what color would you use to describe this memory?
It is dark grey, almost with a kind of green and yellow.