Lin Fanglu’s practice is steeped in the traditional handicrafts of her native China, specifically the textile arts pursued by craftswomen in the rural southwesterly provinces of Yunnan and Guizhou. These are the time-honoured arts of her home country that Lin seeks, above all, to rediscover and reinterpret through her practice, and to allow others to rediscover by way of her work. They are also, overwhelmingly, the arts of women – Lin’s channelling of traditional Chinese textile practices is, not least, a feminist project to revalue cultural forms too often sidelined in patriarchal society: Lin’s longest-running series of work, begun during the middle of the last decade and simply entitled She, is a tribute to these crafts’ vitality and endurance against the odds.

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The She series features a number of wall-bound works produced from materials including cotton thread, cotton cloth, and bamboo, around twenty of which were produced during the artist’s spring 2022 residency at the Swatch Art Peace Hotel in Shanghai. In each of these works, Lin’s materials are intricately woven into dense, monochrome expanses of fabric, whose patterns and rhythms recall all manner of organic forms – from proliferating foliage (She’s Hydrating, 2022), budding flowers (She’s Blooming No. 2, 2022), and meandering rhizomes (She’s Tangling, 2022), to more fantastical intimations of tentacled and spongiform lifeforms that appear as if from the depths of the ocean. At times, the sense that the works might envelop or entangle the viewer in their webs imbues the work with an inviting, nurturing warmth – the tactility of She’s Blooming No. 2, She’s Tingling No. 1, and She’s Tingling No. 2 teases us with the promise of comfort and repose. At other times, as with the protruding tentacles of She’s Seducing (2022) and the grasping claws of She’s Bursting No. 2 (2022), this begins to shade into something a little more ominous: the promise of envelopment gives way to the threat of devourment.

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These kind of dualities – these qualitative ambiguities – continue in the works’ play between delicacy and monumentality, softness and hardness, vulnerability and durability. For all the soft, delicate tactility of the cotton and bamboo fabrics, the sheer bulk of a freestanding sculpture such as She’s Another Stone (2021) – measuring 650 x 650 x 650 cm – lends the work a weightiness and unyielding physicality that hints, however subtly, at something altogether more megalithic and immovable than its material composition alone would suggest. Similarly, the fossil-like spiral textures of the gigantic, wall-bound She (produced in 2016, and measuring 600 x 550 x 300 cm), the work that lends its title to the series as a whole and which won Lin Fanglu the Loewe Foundation Craft Prize in 2021, suggests a sense of prehistoric permanence that belies its literal fragility.

Prior to her engagement with fabrics, during the course of her undergraduate and postgraduate studies at Beijing’s Central Academy of Fine Arts between 2008 and 2016, Lin experimented with a wide range of traditional media, including glass, ceramics, and even Japanese lacquerware, during a period spent on a student exchange in Tokyo in 2011. It was in 2014, upon the occasion of her first visit to Zoucheng village in the city of Dali, Yunnan, that Lin first worked with textiles. Her experience in Yunnan was doubtless foundational for her subsequent creative path, but it is also possible that her attraction to working with fabrics goes back further still, finding its roots in aspects of her upbringing. As a child, Lin’s mother opened a tailoring business, and the artist remembers growing up in her mother’s shop, surrounded by ‘fabrics, needles, and sewing machines,’ all of which ‘were very familiar and friendly to me.’ Accordingly, while Lin insists that her works are imbued with a variety of feelings and thoughts – often determined by her state of mind during the period of their creation – an abiding dimension of her use of fabrics is that sense of nurture, care, and the expression of love: ‘“Love” or “mother’s love” is one of the themes of my creation,” she affirms.

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In Zhoucheng village, Lin first encountered the craftswomen of the Bai community. Living among them, getting to know them, and mining the local knowledge in the manner of an ethnographer – the artist cites Claude Levi-Strauss’s Tristes Tropiques and Nigel Barley’s The Innocent Anthropologist as key sources of inspiration – Lin began studying the art of Bai tie-dying. She quickly developed a profound respect for the intensity of the labour through which the Bai women produced their work, as well as an equally profound admiration of the beauty of the works themselves. This fascination for the craftswomen’s process of creation – for the untold hours of anonymous work that each Bai tie-dye piece represents – is reflected in Lin’s own pieces, which reveal a central concern with the process of their own making. It is through this aspect in particular, through the commitment and attention to the demands of the material and to the traditional techniques of manipulation that it solicits – stretching, stitching, folding, gathering, pleating, and knotting – that Lin’s work most clearly expresses its maternal, nurturing, and loving dimension.

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Among the aspects of Bai tie-dying that first impressed Lin during her time in Yunnan province was the fact that so much of the labour necessary to produce the beautiful dye patterns for which the practice is known is rendered invisible in the final works – the needles that are painstakingly stitched in place over countless hours are all finally removed to leave only their traces in the mesmerising marks of the dyed fabric. In what may be interpreted as a further testament to the craftswomen’s dedication and resilience, then, Lin’s She series arrests that moment of production: the fabrics remain twisted, twirled, folded, and otherwise contorted into position; as such, they lay bare the complexity of that process in perpetuity.

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In 2020, Lin travelled to the village of Sanbao in Guizhou province, where she discovered a further centuries-old craft tradition in the work of the Dong women of the region. The resultant series of works, entitled Light and Hammer, complements She’s tribute to the Bai craftswomen in its exploration of the shimmering qualities of the ‘bright fabric’ employed by the Dong artisans. Like the She series, Light and Hammer sticks to a monochrome palette, all the better here to emphasise the incredible qualities of light that Lin – following in the footsteps of the Dong craftswomen – manages to elicit in her use of the region’s traditional material, which is beaten repeatedly with mallets to produce a radiant copper finish. For Lin, the sheer repetition of the act of incessantly beating the fabric to produce an ever-more iridescent surface is analogous to the craftswomen’s own endurance in the face of wider societal change: ‘What runs through the lives of these Dong female craftsmen is their hard work and selfless dedication to their families,’ the artist has reverently stated.

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Where She reveled in soft textures (albeit with an occasional prickly edge), Light and Hammer dramatise the metallic qualities of the bright fabric: in Light and Hammer Nos. 1, 2, and 3, this dramatic sheen is accentuated by the sharpness and dynamism of the sculptures’ folded and twisted forms, qualities that are in turn enhanced by their display atop geometric mirrored surfaces. As such, Light and Hammer’s concave and convex involutions imbue this craft tradition with an even more contemporary, somehow neo-Modernist, aesthetic. This further twist finds its culmination (at least, to date) in the corkscrew-like form of Love Under the Hammer, a wall-bound work that matches 2016’s She for its translation of the artisanal into the monumental, stretching this time to a width of six-and-a-half meters.

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Across both of these series, and elsewhere in her evolving practice, Lin Fanglu demonstrates a remarkable facility with her chosen media – an ability to assimilate and synthesise a host of material practices – and an even more remarkable ability to filter time-honoured artisanal textile traditions through a twenty-first-century sensibility. In doing so, she continues to find and distil new formal possibilities and expressions from among the most longstanding material cultures of her country.

For her solo show at Samgaksan Geumam Museum of Art, Lin exhibits a range of wall and floor pieces from the She series, among which the most recent works, She’s Hills numbers 1–5, have been created in response to the artist’s 2022 visit to Seoul and to this region of South Korea, and to her encounter with Bukhansan (Bukhan Mountain) in particular. As much as they thereby continue Lin’s established practice of responding to the specificities of the localities that she visits, the She’s Hills works are also notable for marking a shift in scale for the She series as a whole. Indeed, the monumental size and presence of these five works is such as to test the limits of their container, the Samgaksan gallery spaces, in their evocation of the sublimity and awesomeness of Bukhansan and its vicinity.

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The works gathered here alongside She’s Hills numbers 1–5, in their alternation between the muted earth tones of the natural cotton and the deep blues of the tie-dyed pieces, take on additional connotations of nature in the context of this exploration of the mountain as a form – specifically, land and sky, those elements for which mountains are the principal meeting points.

However, for the floor-based She’s Hills works especially, a further duality inheres – a point of tension or apparent contradiction that is key to the works’ aesthetic interest. On the one hand, their formal irregularity – their slumped, creased, and crumpled deportment – suggests a sense of their own provisionality, while this quality, together with their expansive occupation of the gallery floor, recalls the antiform ‘scatter’ experimentation of American sculptors of the late 1960s and early 1970s: artists such as Robert Morris, Robert Smithson and Richard Serra, whose works of the period reacted against the slick uniformities of Minimalism. To this extent, they suggest – and restate – all the contingency and deliberate impermanence of the most intriguing sculptures of that generation. And yet, they do so in evocation, once again, of the most megalithic and immovable of phenomena: the mountain as the most ancient and immutable of geologies.

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by Bill Roberts

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