Monika Lin at Art Labor

Swimming #1, 45x75 cm
Free space and time are shrinking and becoming a luxury as the waxing presence of formless corporate entities continue to gain prominence throughout the world. In her first Shanghai show, American born artist Monika Lin's Child Palace forces the viewer into her nightmare of organic shapes and blueprint gridlock. Hanging amorphous globs, sometimes fleshy and other times reminiscent of child mobiles create a slight claustrophobic feeling of unease. Lin's paintings also intend to invoke this feeling, but end up coming off as unintentionally cluttered with the content of her work failing to synthesize with her material. The layers created by placing a layer of resin over the canvas allows Lin to fill the space with a number of different graphic elements including flowers, grids, and "biomorphic" forms to surround the playing children. However disparate, the artist's affinity for composing each piece is evident and she attempts to emulate this within the Art Labor space with her hanging sewn forms.


Unlike her Double Happiness pieces that also contain a layer of organized prescription drugs along with the children and other elements, Child Palace's themes are akin to an invisible layer amongst the others, found not through wordy speculation, but a subconscious sensation felt while viewing the piece and dodging all the hanging pustules.

Girl With Pods #2, 30x30 cm