Lin Wang

Lin Wang, China Oslo-based ceramicist Lin Wang produces large-scale still life installations and sculptural assemblages which investigate the corporeality and historic resonance of porcelain. Over centuries, porcelain’s combination of a kaolin-rich white clay body with deep cobalt glazes has registered the ongoing effects of contact and trade, as well as the phantasmic projections of a long-standing dialog between East and West. As an artist working between China and Norway, Wang’s interest in this interchange holds personal significance, tinged by her own wanderlust, homesickness, and experiences of cultural discovery. Since 2016, Wang has explored these themes through a cycle of exhibitions, video works, performances, and workshops titled Exotic Dreams and Poetic Misunderstanding.

As a group, these works intersperse the iconography of traditional blue-and-white chinaware with imagery of sailors’ tattoos, Buddhist and Christian religious deities, and the fantastic creatures populating the terra incognita of early maps. Wang engages these varied histories, combining her own experiences as ceramicist and tattoo artist, traveler and immigrant, fantasist and materialist. Her craft-based interdisciplinary practice is structured by the many forms of sculptural tableaus (the scroll, the folding screen, the still life arrangement) — artistic scenarios rife with complex interactions between personal objects, symbols of status, reminders of mortality, and allegorical stand-ins. Throughout, the delicate materiality and translucence of porcelain — which itself summons comparison with bone and skin — is refigured not only as canvas but as a quasi-corporeal body, marked by the ambitions of commerce and the aftermath of empire.

Wang received a bachelor’s degree in sculpture from the China Academy of Art and a master’s degree in fine art from the University of Bergen. Her central research project Exotic Dreams and Poetic Misunderstandings consists of an ongoing series of exhibitions over the past decade. In 2019, as part of the research for this project, she produced two solo exhibitions at the Kunsthall Grenland and the Vigeland Museum. She has completed numerous public commissions, including for the Hammerfest Hospital, Sarpsborg Library, and Tønsberg Courthouse. Her work is included in the collections of the Nordenfjeldske Kunstindustrimuseum, Oslo Kommune, Porsgrunn Kommune, and the National Museum, Oslo, Norway.