On the Tracks of Canton Express: Interview with Lin Yilin
By Crystal Wu
Portrait of LIN YILIN. Courtesy the artist.
Piles of gray concrete bricks and six television sets playing grainy footage of what appear to be a collection of performances sit atop the bare-bone structure of a steel bunk bed in one corner of M+’s exhibition “Canton Express,” a 2017 iteration of the project originally presented as part of the exhibition “Zone of Urgency,” which was curated by Hou Hanru for the 2003 edition of the Venice Biennale. The work, Hotbed (2003), donated to M+ by prominent Chinese collector Guan Yi in 2013, is a combination of installation and performance, two common tropes in the practice of Guangzhou-born, New York and Beijing-based artist Lin Yilin.
