MICHAEL LIN: ‘What is this? Is this art?’ That was a question I was asked a lot. I guess I was more interested in questioning, how art functions, and so I guess I always gravitated towards art that was somehow functional.

A lot of my works are untitled. It’s kind of an open-ended situation. There is a certain kind of liberty to that.

The audience were invited to sit on the work, to lie on there. Some people took their afternoon naps on it. With each of the pillows, I made paintings also. So, kind of somehow bridging the gap. They didn’t feel that kind of distance with the art.

Most of the fabrics I have been using for the last twenty years in my work has come from very popular prints, I would say from the sixties, seventies, all the way up to the eighties maybe, in Taiwan.

Textiles are something quite intimate. Especially these textile designs. [They] were mostly used as the wedding night bed. They were given by the wife’s family as part of the dowry. I discovered that the audience had a very immediate kind of reaction to the patterns. It was important that it was familiar to the people that saw them, and in general most people have a real kind of nostalgia. So, I started to focus more on that idea of, you know, using this collective memory of the past, as a vehicle to kind of have some sort of dialogue about art and exhibition with the audience.

‘Untitled (Cigarette Break)’ was a kind of attempt to make work that the audience really had to be in contact with. If you sat on the chair and the art retain the trace of your interaction and your physical body with it, you know, smoking, or blowing out smoke is kind of a visualisation of your breath. It’s also a form of relaxation. It’s also a kind of break from a routine. So, I think those are all communicated in what’s there. And then the paintings then become some sort of space.

There are five paintings in this work, and they relate directly to the five cushions that make up a chair. So, it’s this kind of expansion of this macro-micro relationship. For me it was about somehow creating a space rather than an object. The work doesn’t end at the object. It was to make work that was difficult to somehow see the edges of the work so that you were immersed, or you were in the work or part of the work. We’re doing something that’s completely outside of the exhibition experience. And I think that that was a provocation.