Asia
Lin Yilin
Safely Maneuvering Across Lin He Road
1995
Safely Maneuvering Across Lin He Road
For his action, Safely Maneuvering across Lin He Road, Lin Yilin built a brick wall on one side of a busy main street in the city of Guangzhou. He then took bricks from the sidewalk end of the wall and moved them to the street side, slowly extending the wall into the street. Repeating the same gesture for hours, he leapfrogged the whole wall across the street. His labor transformed a stable wall into a moving one that also disrupted the heavy traffic. This action creates moments of pause in the turbulent flow of urban life that permit rare moments in which one can contemplate the city’s fundamental changes.
Lin Yilin is a versatile and internationally significant artist whose work has been marked strongly by his provocative urban interventions—an approach with deep resonance given the increasing attention to the politics of space and insurgent actions in the climate of the Occupy movement. He uses sculpture, installation, performance, photography, and videos to explore how urban development affects the ways in which people relate to community and space.