(smartshanghai.com)
Updated: 2008-01-23 11:35

Upon entering the Shanghai Gallery of Art from the rather wet and mind-numbing cold on the Bund, I was grateful to receive a warm greeting by enthusiastic Art Director Mr. David Chan, who then offered an insightful tour of Lin Yilin's solo show, "A Spatio-temporal Tunnel."

Chinese born artist Yilin, now currently living in New York, started as a performance artist, taking his pieces to the streets of Guangzhou. In the southern city, he co-founded the collective "Big Tail Elephant," which undertook radical and confrontational performance art dealing with modernization in the urban space. In one work, a builder engaged in the act of building, tearing down and rebuilding a brick wall in the middle of a busy street in Guangzhou. The piece is intended as commentary against the frenzied pace and commercialization of the city scape. The directly confrontational nature of the piece, as well as the themes of modernization and the transformation of urban space, are elements which resurface in Yilin's solo show at the SGA.

Yilin's solo exhibit at the SGA, entitled "A Spatio-temporal tunnel," stages a tunnel that critically investigates the artist's interest with time and space, and features work he has produced over the past two years. His first works on display are 10 video monitors entitled "Problem," filmed with students while the artist was in Norway. Each presents a strange situation in a public setting, and are quite mesmerizing. One screen depicts Yilin and an accomplice at a subway station permanently facing away from the platform as trains come and go. Rebellion against the flow of life one might ask? I'm still unsure, but the image is arresting. "Participation is important in Yilin's work," stresses Mr. Chan, "having people in his work give it meaning."

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