Tan Lin
| Tan A. Lin | |
|---|---|
| Born | 1957 Seattle, Washington |
| Nationality | Chinese-American |
| Education | Carleton College Columbia University |
| Known for | Poetry, Filmmaking |
| Notable work | HEATH(plagiarism/outsource), 7 Controlled Vocabularies and Obituary 2004: The Joy of Cooking |
| Style | "Ambient" literature |
Tan Anthony Lin is a Chinese-American poet, author, filmmaker, and professor. Born in Seattle, Washington, he is most notably recognized for his work in "ambient" literature, a style that draws on and samples source material from popular culture. This type of literature primarily focuses on highlighting issues with regard to copyright, plagiarism, and technology.[1]
Contents
Personal life
Lin was born in 1957 to Chinese-American immigrants born in Shanghai, China, and Beijing, China who immigrated to Seattle in 1948. Ten years later, the family moved to Athens, Ohio, and in 1959, Tan's sister, Maya Ying Lin, was born.[2] She is an American designer and artist who designed the Vietnam Veterans Memorial in Washington, D.C.[3] Their mother, Julia Chang Lin, is a poet and has taught literature at Ohio University. Their father, Henry Huan Lin, was a ceramist and former dean of the College of Fine Arts at the Ohio University.
Lin received a Bachelor of Arts in English from Carleton College in Northfield, Minnesota. He received his Master of Arts and Ph.D in English from Columbia University in New York City. In addition to writing essays, poems, and books, Lin currently teaches creative writing at New Jersey City University. He has previously taught at the University of Virginia and the California Institute of the Arts, as well as brief stints at the Formation Language School in Paris, France, Columbia University, and Brooklyn College.[1][4]
Works
Lin's style as an artist comes from the principle of "ambient" literature. A commentary by Katherine Elaine Sanders described the style by saying "Lin leads his audiences in exploring the temporary ephemera that fills our daily interactions: emails, Twitter feeds, Facebook messages, blogs, movies, magazines, and advertisements, indexes, photographs, and recipes".[5] The first official published work from Lin was Lotion Bullwhip Giraffe in 1996, a "meditation backwards," where Lin invents new poetry structures through the manipulation of the mechanics of language.[6] In 2003, Lin published his second work, Blipsoak01, where Lin ones again uses inventive poetry structure, this time through the abstract visual placement of words. In ambience is a novel with a logo, Lin uses a subtitle system consisting of citations in the format of Google search entries.[7] Less than a year later, Lin published HEATH, which also utilizes the same subtitle system as presented in ambience, but also focuses on language and graphics from various online sources. In 2010, Lin published 7 Controlled Vocabularies and Obituary 2004: The Joy of Cooking, where Lin continues his inventive poetry structure again, this time through the style of "a field guide to the arts".[8] Most recently, in 2011, Lin published Insomnia and the Aunt, in which Lin mounrns the passing of his aunt who owned a motel in the middle of nowhere.
HEATH
In the project HEATH(Plagiarism/Outsource), Lin presents an accumulation of language and graphics from any kind of online source, ranging from advertisements to Facebook to scholarly articles. For Lin, it touches on "who is more generally responsible for certain texts", rather than touching "on who physically authors a text."[9] He explores the idea of an ambient novel by highlighting how a book works and how a reader reacts to a printed object while the content itself is arguably meaningless. The content skips from subject to subject in a seemingly random way through plagiarisms, outsourced material, and meta-content.[10]
7 Controlled Vocabularies and Obituary 2004: The Joy of Cooking
In 7 Controlled Vocabularies and Obituary 2004: The Joy of Cooking, Lin writes prose poems that are disrupted by itself, alluding to an idea of art being "relaxingly meaningless." Lin distorts the line between various aesthetic disciplines and takes avant-garde notions to a new level by diffusing them into ambient formats such as yoga or meditation. The seven sections of the book all take on a different art form, including photography, painting, the novel, architecture, music, theory, and film, through a format of both text and photographs.
The critical acclaim for 7 Controlled Vocabularies and Obituary 2004: The Joy of Cooking is generally positive. An endearing review from popular and controversial post-digital poet Kenneth Goldsmith says "Lin proposes a radical idea for reading: not reading. Worlds, so prevalent today, are merely elements that constitute fleeting engagements." It is also the winner of the Association for Asian American Studies Book Award in Poetry in 2012.[8]
Bibliography
Essays
- Information Archives, the De-Materialization of Language, and Kenneth Goldsmith's Fidget and No. 111 2.7.93-10.20.96.
- Anachronistic Modernism, Cabinet, Winter 2000/2001
- Warhol's Aura and the Language of Writing, Cabinet, Fall 2001
- Boredom and Nonsense in Wonderland, Introduction, Notes, and For Further Reading, Alice's Adventures in Wonderland and Through the Looking Glass, Barnes and Noble Classics, 2004
- Eric Baudelaire's Sugar Water, the Deleuzean Event, and the Dispersion of Spectatorial Labour, Reading Room, February 2008
- Disco as Operating System, Part 1, Criticism, Winter 2008
- PLAGIARISM: A response to Thomas Fink, Otoliths, June 2009[11]
Published Works
- Lotion Bullwhip Giraffe, 1996
- BlipSoak01, 2003
- ambience is a novel with logo, 2007
- Kruder & Dorfmeister, 2007
- Heath (Plagiarism/Outsource), 2007
- 7 Controlled Vocabularies and Obituary 2004: The Joy of Cooking, 2010
- Blurb, 2010
- Purple/Pink Appendix, 2010
- Insomnia and the Aunt, 2011
Art Exhibitions
- Automasters, 1999
- Poetry Plastique, 2001
- Between Language and Form, 2002
- 27 Merging Artists, 2002
- One Place and the Other, 2002
- Code Residue, 2005
- The Baghdad Batteries, 2010
- The Evryali Score, 2010
Public Art Projects
- Itinerant Gastronomy, 1996
- The Echo Variations, The Edge of Summer Cleans Autumn, 1998
- Cleveland Public Library Project, 1998
- "Flatness", 2001
- Input, 2004
- Chinese Chalk in a Parking Lot, 2009
- TwitterChalk, 2009
Film, Theatre, and Video Works
- Calendar the Siamese, 1996
- Poetry in Uniforms, 1996
- Dub Version, 2002
- Eleven Minute Painting, Reading Module v. 01, 2002
- Poni Hoax, 2005
- Disco Eats Itself, 2007
Awards
- Danforth Foundation Nominee, 1979
- Mademoiselle Poetry Prize, 1979
- Gertrude Stein Award for Innovative American Poetry, 1984 and 1986
- Bennett Cerf Award, Columbia University, 1985
- Van Rensselaer Award for Poetry, 1986
- Academy of American Poets Honorable Mention, Columbia University, 1987
- President's Fellow, Columbia University, 1990
- The Pushcart Prizes, Honorable Mention for Fiction, 2004
- J. Paul Getty Visiting Scholar Fellowship, The Getty Trust, Los Angeles, 2004
- Asian American Arts Alliance Urban Artist/Initiative/NYC Grant, 2006-2007
- Andy Warhol Foundation/Creative Capital Arts Writing Grant, 2006-2007[4]
References
- ↑ 1.0 1.1 Lua error in package.lua at line 80: module 'strict' not found.
- ↑ Lua error in package.lua at line 80: module 'strict' not found.
- ↑ Lua error in package.lua at line 80: module 'strict' not found.
- ↑ 4.0 4.1 Lua error in package.lua at line 80: module 'strict' not found.
- ↑ Lua error in package.lua at line 80: module 'strict' not found.
- ↑ Lua error in package.lua at line 80: module 'strict' not found.
- ↑ Lua error in package.lua at line 80: module 'strict' not found.
- ↑ 8.0 8.1 Lua error in package.lua at line 80: module 'strict' not found.
- ↑ Lua error in package.lua at line 80: module 'strict' not found.
- ↑ Lua error in package.lua at line 80: module 'strict' not found.
- ↑ Lua error in package.lua at line 80: module 'strict' not found.
