Nature is 'nature' for us by virtue of its practical and biological use-value. But it cannot be reduced to this, no matter how extensively we appropriate it. Nature and the embodied subject inhabit one another.
Paul Crowther 1
Miao-Fang Lin's colorful ceramic sculpture evokes the centrality of the sea to the lifeworld of her ancestors and her childhood by referencing the biomorphic forms of ocean creatures. More than specifically representing given creatures, the works evoke the sense of plenitude and bountifulness of sea life, and something of its alterity as well: there is an otherness to the world of water in which these creatures dwell.
The round-bodied, segmented worm-like forms of Elastic, Lithe, Vitality, Shuttle, and Ramble wriggle across the south wall of the gallery and an adjacent pedestal. The animation of their gestures, and intensity of color are playful. The roundness of the segmented forms is non-threatening, even friendly. The works are invitingly tactile, in their smoothness and areas of relative roughness, as in Dancing. Yet the sharp, triangular forms emerging from the rounded segmented worm-like forms are equivocal: on the one hand, these emergent forms seem playful as well, as if the creatures are sticking their tongues out at the viewer; on the other hand, the emergent triangular forms suggest parasites emerging from their hosts.
The equivocality of these emergent forms in Lin's work suggest the reversibility of our relation to nature. Nature is what is not culture, what does not have its being by human agency. Thus nature is an alterity, but an alterity in which we are situated, the place of our embodied selves and our projects, the source of the resources for the material cause of our cultural projects. Nature is likewise the resource for much of the formal cause of our projects as well, as they are here in Lin's work. With respect to formal cause, nature is not only the site of forms referenced, but the ur-site of the qualities of form: mass and volume, shape and line, texture and color. And most fundamentally, nature is the ur-site of the liveliness of its creatures, humans included.
As a giving form to a way of perceiving and experience entities in their appearing, artworks manifest the emergence of a world from earth. 2 Or, from the sea.
Miao-Fang Lin's recent exhibitions include: MishMash, NCECA, Indianapolis; Ceramics: Texas and Beyond, University of Texas - Pan-American; See Sea, Verizon Gallery, Irving, Texas; First Taiwan Ceramics Biennale, Taipei County Yingge Ceramics Museum; Craft Houston 2000, Houston Center for Contemporary Crafts, Buddy Holly Center, Lubbock, South Texas Institute for the Arts, Corpus Christi, Galveston Arts Center; Texas Mud, Dallas Center for Contemporary Art. Miao-Fang Lin received the B.F.A. from the National Taiwan College of Arts, and the M.A. from the University of Dallas; she is a 2004 M.F.A. candidate at the University of Dallas.