Michael Lin
Model Home – A Proposition
10 March–3 June 2012
Artists: Michael Lin, Atelier Bow-Wow, Li Xiangning, Cheng Ran, Lou Nanli
Curator: Lai Hsiangling
Associate curator: Alexandra Munroe
Supported by Rockbund
No.20 Huqiu Road, Shanghai
Model Home is the latest proposition presented by artist Michael Lin, by way of an interdisciplinary collaboration. Taking the initial collaborative work by Lin and the Japanese architects Atelier Bow-Wow as departure point, this exhibition invites artists Cheng Ran, Lou Nanli, urban studies researcher Li Xiangning, as well as construction and furniture workers to contribute and participate in the realization of this project. In doing so, Model Home will echo the proposition of Walter Gropius for the Bauhaus (1919) with the idea of a total work of art which integrates architecture, painting and sculpture. This project seeks to explore the processes in the production of contemporary art, its implication and dissemination into society, as well as issues concerning site-specificity and the development of our urban landscape.
It is common in Lin’s work to juxtapose architectural spaces and decorative ornaments and set up dialogues between them. He is widely known for appropriating textile motifs from everyday life, which relate to localities or cultures, and transplanting them into public spaces. Through such interventions and transpositions of the context, he makes the exchanges and conflicts between different cultural traditions visible. As an interdisciplinary work, Model Home departs from and centers on Lin’s emblematic wall paintings, which connect collaborative efforts in a wide range of areas.
Model Home intends to call for a new collaborative relationship that transcends the boundaries between communities, disciplines and social identities, by exploring possible interactions between art and society. The exhibition site is transformed into one where social development and cultural production are re-presented, demonstrating the complex situations of the social structure and individual existence in the city. Viewed in this perspective, Model Home is a conceptual social practice that transcends the boundaries of culture and medium, and indeed experiments with the role the Rockbund Art Museum can play in our contemporary society.
The Model Home sound track is realized in collaboration with Leo Xu Projects.
ABOUT ROCKBUND ART MUSEUM
Located at the famous Bund area in Shanghai, and echoing to its building’s historical heritage as the first modern museum in China, Rockbund Art Museum (RAM) is involved towards the construction, consolidation, influence and sustainability of an innovative organization strongly engaged to promote high quality projects in the international contemporary art scene. Since its inauguration in 2010, the museum has launched exhibitions of internationally acclaimed artists and curators Cai Guoqiang, Zeng Fanzhi, Hou Hanru, Fumio Nanjo, among others. In addition, the museum has organized more than 150 educational events and projects open free to the public. By doing so, RAM seeks to build solid cultural networking with local and international partnerships leading to innovative cooperation projects against the global era with the decisive economic and cultural transformations. In the future, the museum would stick to establishing and sharing the expanded territories for art, knowledge, creativity in China and abroad, by which means to foster circulation of ideas, works of art and people (artists, researchers, curators, mediators), to identify, invest in and disseminate emergent and cross-disciplinary art movements at international level, and finally to think through and share art’s social implications. RAM also explores the possibility of the museums’ sustainability in the today’s cultural and social context; and hope to contribute to the establishment of the institutional structure and environment of contemporary art museums in China.
For more information on RAM, please visit www.rockbundartmuseum.org
