Ink and Paper: Lin Yan’s Everlasting Layers

Description

Alisan Atelier’s Lin Yan: Everlasting Layers show is the contemporary artist’s first comprehensive solo exhibition in Hong Kong, spanning two decades of her groundbreaking work. The show highlights Lin’s evolution from early experiments to large-scale, site-specific installations that transform fragile Xuan paper with ink, plaster and urban materials. By layering and folding paper, Lin creates poetic meditations on memory, decay and renewal, bridging Chinese artistic tradition and contemporary global practice. Through layered imagery, her works invite viewers to contemplate ecological impermanence and inner tranquillity – a meditation on humanity’s delicate yet enduring bond with the natural world.

Born in Beijing into a renowned artistic family, Lin’s maternal grandfather was pioneering modernist painter Pang Xunqin (1906–1958), and her mother, Pang Dao (1934–2025), an accomplished abstract painter. Rooted in Chinese ink painting, Lin’s practice is enriched by her studies at L’École nationale supérieure des Beaux-Arts in Paris and over 20 years in New York, where she developed a cross-cultural vision. This blend of Beijing’s legacy, Parisian rigour and New York’s avant-garde energy inspires her intricate installations on Xuan paper. Her work has been exhibited worldwide – including at New York’s China Square and Flatiron Prow Art Space, Beijing’s Yuan Art Museum and Brussels’ Associazione Culturale Officina.

Alongside Lin’s exhibition, the film screening of The Unsung Heroes of Ink explores the vital role of paper and paper-making in Chinese ink art. The screening on 12 July at 15:00 will be followed by a conversation with the documentary director and producer, Olivia Wang, and Alan Yeung, associate curator of ink art at M+.