Lin Tianmiao
There’s No Fun in It!
Power Station of Art
Shanghai
30 Sep, 2025–4 Jan, 2026

Curated by Pi Li and organized by the Power Station of Art in Shanghai, “There’s No Fun in It!” surveyed more than three decades of Lin Tianmiao’s career. At the entrance to the exhibition, a massive sphere wrapped in white string, an early work after which the show takes its title, established the artist’s preoccupation with the intertwining of art and everyday life: at times cynical, at times playful, with immense poetic strength. The feminist lineage of intellectuals such as Nancy F. Cott, who developed the concept of the “Woman’s Sphere,” and Dolores Hayden, whose seminal text The Grand Domestic Revolution (1981) reimagined the home as a site of political transformation, lingered as a specter throughout the galleries, where the body, the object, and the domestic realm formed a critical unit.

Lin staged this reimagining of domestic life across scale, from the intimate objects of daily existence to the institutional space of the museum itself. White silk thread, the deceptively delicate material that pervades Lin’s work, binds together a narrative of resilience across an extensive career marked by childbearing, motherhood, cancer, and illness. Bound and Unbound (1997), a large-scale installation situated within the first gallery, presented pots, pans, bottles, utensils, burners, and a sewing machine scattered across the floor. These conventional and mass-produced items become identifiable only by their silhouettes, their colors and details subsumed by the silk wrapping with which they were painstakingly and individually covered. Behind them, a video projection shows an oversized hand cutting thread, while the familiar yet menacing sound of scissors reverberated throughout the gallery space.

Lin’s oeuvre persistently draws attention to domesticity and its undervalued centrality to art. Pieces like The Hanger and The Epidermis (both 2008) conflate the female form with the everyday object, blurring the boundary between the two. From these objects, threads extend outward, elegantly suggesting body parts. The corporeal lingers, intangible yet omnipresent and anchored in every work. Though never explicitly shown, the female form manifests through Lin’s obsessive treatment of household items, which continually evokes the paradox of women’s roles: conceivers but not architects, economists without recognition, and crucial members of society who are nonetheless denied political agency.

The exhibition—part history, part manifesto—proposed the home as a revolutionary site and positioned domestic life as the theater where existence unfolds as a microcosm. 1.62 meters (2003) offered a poignant synthesis of Lin’s critical preoccupations. White threads stretched across two walls, which were mounted specifically to divide one of the main galleries in half. Visitors were invited to walk beneath the strands, traversing the corridor between the walls. Lin demonstrated how a simple, fragile thread could function as an architectural tool that created intimate environments for introspection.

Annotated plans for the exhibition revealed how Lin appropriated the museum’s blueprints, transforming the institutional space into an intimate theater of life. Mirroring Bound and Unbound, Loss & Gain (2014) suspended fragments of synthetic human skeletons and body parts from the ceiling. Here, Lin pushed the show’s central premise to its extreme—the body itself became fractured material. On the floor, shadows cast by disembodied pieces recalled the domestic commodities strewn across the floor of the first gallery. The artist’s struggles with cancer over the past decade permeated the second half of the retrospective, where quotidian objects gave way to medical instruments, extending her consideration of the physicality across different life cycles. Body, object, and home remain inseparable, intertwined in a singular relationship. “There’s No Fun in It!” prompted reflections on an alternative art history, converting the museum into a meditative space that embodies both home and the studio.

Béatrice Grenier is a curator, editor, and writer based in Paris. She is the director of international programs at the Fondation Cartier pour l'art contemporain and ArtAsiaPacific’s Paris desk editor.