Christopher Lin | 林敦頤
Christopher Lin 林敦頤 is a Brooklyn-based artist and educator with a background in research science. Fueled by a lifelong obsession with fossils, his experimental installations, sculptures, and performances question the world we inhabit and envision the one we will leave behind. Often collaborating with non-human organisms and wider ecologies, his time-based works synthesize elements of environmental ecology with Zen poetics to explore the interconnected nature of our material world.
After receiving a BA from Yale University and an MFA from Hunter College, Lin was awarded the C12 Emerging Artist Fellowship in 2016. He has shown work and performed throughout New York City, including at: SVA Curatorial Practice, ABC No Rio, Recess Art, Flux Factory, Wave Hill, the United Nations, and the Queens Museum. He was a 2020 Bronx Museum AIM Emerging Artist Fellow and a 2022 Wave Hill Winter Workspace Artist-in-Residence. He currently teaches at Hunter College and Parsons, The New School and is co-director of the research-based artist collective, Sprechgesang Institute.
My ongoing body of work, titled Future Fossils, explores the eventuality of human absence. I have long been inspired and fascinated by fossils of extinct species in distant eras, memento moris which provoked thoughts of our own inevitable end and of the material world we will leave behind. In Future Fossils, I approach the concept of human extinction not through pessimism, but as the inevitable and unavoidable truth to our existence—one that also contains incredible beauty in its transience. Influenced by Buddhist teachings and environmental ecology, I connect fragments from both creation myths and extinction events to visualize this eventuality that is critical to understanding the whole cycle of existence from beginning to end. This ongoing project is an exploration to attain a better understanding of our place in this world both spiritually and scientifically.
Fossil Memory animates existential visions from an organism calcified and long dead. A bleached brain coral rests on a pillow while a closed ecosystem containing a micro-landscape of moss and lichen looms, casting a shadow from above like a distant dream. Opposing vectors of gravity and buoyancy push and pull at the objects while conjuring parables such as Paradise Lost or Castle in the Sky.