Model Home is an exhibition of new conceptual work, made by Michael Lin in collaboration with fellow artists and craftspersons from a variety of different milieu. The exhibition has its origins in a partnership between Lin and Japanese architecture firm Atelier Bow-Wow and has been brought to completion with the cooperation of invited building workers, furniture makers and musicians, film-makers and urban studies researchers based in Shanghai. The exhibition is an experiment in composite creative work, combining a variety of mediums including painting, sculpture, installation, music, film and performance.
Inspiration has been drawn from the history of the Rockbund Museum itself and events that occurred at the same time as the building the gallery is housed in was constructed in the early years of the twentieth century, also from the Bauhaus manifesto with its emphasis on the social functions of art. The artist and architects hope to be able to give a response to the Bauhaus call for architecture to be a vehicle for multi-media art and their advocacy of the combination of architecture, painting and sculpture as a single unity that is suited to the cultural context of contemporary Shanghai and the Rockbund Museum. It is also hoped that through a range of art experiments rooted in cross-disciplinary collaboration, a debate can be inspired about the modes of production and social practise of art, the relationship between site specificity and the cultural landscape of its given locale, and creation-as-dialogue and the public sphere.
About the Curator
Lai Hsiangling has over 20 years experience in art curation and management in Taiwan. She received her M.A. in Art History in University of Kansas, and completed a postgraduate course in Museum Studies in George Washington University.
She had been Curator in National Taiwan Fine Arts Museum and Taipei Fine Arts Museum，and later on, Director in Museum of Contemporary Art, Taipei. Apart from that, Ms. Lai has extensive experience in management in not-for-profit arts institutions, as Executive Directorof Dimension Endowment of Art and Director of Grant Department of National Culture and Arts Foundation.
In 2001, she was granted joint award by National Culture and Arts Foundation and Fulbright Foundation of the United States.
About the Artists
Michael Lin is an artist living and working in Taipei , Shanghai , and Brussels . Lin turns away from painting as an object of contemplation toward one of painting as a bounded, physical space, one we can settle into and inhabit (Vivian Rehberg). Lin orchestrates monumental painting installations that re-conceptualize and reconfigure public spaces.
Using patterns and designs appropriated from traditional Taiwanese textiles his works have been exhibited in major institutions and international Biennials around the world, The Museum of Contemporary Art, Tokyo , 2007, UCCA, Beijing , 2008, The Lyon Biennial 2009, The Vancouver Art Gallery, 2010, and most recently at the Singapore Biennial and the Towada Art Center . Transforming the institutional architecture of the public museum, his unconventional paintings invite visitors to reconsider their usual perception of those spaces, and to become an integral part of the work, giving meaning to its potential as an area for interaction, encounter, and re-creation.
Atelier Bow-Wow is a Tokyo-based firm founded by Yoshiharu Tsukamoto and Momoyo Kaijima in 1992. The pair's interest lies in diverse fields ranging from architectural design to urban research and the creation of public artworks, which are produced,based on the theory called “behaviorology”.
The practice has designed and built houses, public and commercial buildings mainly in Tokyo, as well as Europe and The USA. Their urban research studies lead to experimental project 'micro-public-space', a new concept of the public space, which has been exhibited across the world.
