Like many Chinese artists who have relocated to the US, the New York-based Lin Yan is interested in the experience of cultural displacement, and this is reflected in her work's blend of Western art history and traditional Chinese references.
Furthermore, her personal artistic pedigree is one rich in transformation and ideological upheaval - her grandmother was a member of the first generation of modern woman-painters in China, while her mother trained as a social realist painter during the Cultural Revolution. Realized in the black-and-white palette of both ink painting and minimalism, and with rice paper as a recurrent material, her recent work includes black-on-black pastel drawings of foliage and relief-like compositions in which delicate sheets of paper are overlaid in a sculptural collage or wetted, papier-mache style, and then moulded against her studio's brick walls - an imprint of minimalism's ‘truth to materials’. Her exhibition at China Square gallery this February is of new works from her Remaking series. SS