KCCA editorial text
You don’t get what you see — you don’t see what you get
Angela Lyn’s Silk Works for China 2025
Every artwork is based on a unique convergence of coincidences, serendipity, and restrictions. This is a fact that art critics often fail to recognise, and therefore, do not take into account in their descriptions and analyses of artworks. This convergence creates an opportunity for artists, which they may seize, consciously let pass by, or miss unconsciously. If they seize the opportunity, artists create new artworks based on their previous experiments and experiences inside and outside of art. This may involve either connecting with their prior artistic practice or breaking away from it. The quality of the new artworks is reflected in how much they open up new, unexpected, surprising, and/or unsettling experiences for their audience, thereby contributing to the expansion of the audience’s experience and horizons.
A unique constellation of coincidences, serendipity, and restrictions also forms the starting point in the case of the three silk works—or more precisely, silk installations—by the English-Chinese-Swiss artist Angela Lyn for three exhibitions in China in autumn/winter 2025: meet me in the woods (West Bund Art Fair, Lechbinska Gallery, Shanghai), floating roots, pieces of home, the return (Kulangsu Center for Contemporary Art, Red Hall), and letters from the mists (Lin’s Mansion Art Space, Gulangyu, Xiamen, Fujian).
Chinese curator Li Zhenhua, who previously curated the most comprehensive exhibition of Angela Lyn to date: On the Edge of Time (2022, Villa Arconati-FAR, Milan), introduced Lyn’s work to the director of the Kulangsu Center for Contemporary Art (KCCA) in Gulangyu, Xiamen.
The island of Gulangyu (Kulangsu), where Lyn’s father was born and raised in Lu Jiao Road, was home to the well-known Lin family. The island became part of the UNESCO World Heritage in 2017. The Lin’s Mansion, former residence of Lin Er-Jia, Lyn’s great-grandfather, is today a boutique hotel. Recently, a large art space has been added to the facility. When the hotel heard from the artist, they expressed their wish to also exhibit her works as a descendant. Executive Curator Ethan Chen from KCCA saw a unique possibility to create a dual exhibition in both the museum and the Lin’s Mansion. Independently, Lyn’s Swiss gallerist, Julia Lechbinska, decided to present a solo show of Lyn’s works at the West Bund Art Fair 2025 in Shanghai. A situation that allowed the artist to hold a triple exhibition in China.
It was impossible within the allotted time to transport a large body of work to China such as the large-scale serial oil paintings and other objects known to be part of Lyn’s projects. Thus, the artist faced a seemingly insurmountable challenge: Forego the opportunity? Hang copies of the paintings? That was not an option. The artist decided to create three related installations made solely of silk. Silk is light and easy to transport, even in large quantities (so much for the restrictions). Finally, she shaped her project from 350 meters of printed silk, allowing her to play the three spaces ranging from 4 x 8 metres to 7 x 25 metres.
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Angela Lyn is, by her background, artistic practice, and world perception, a painter. However, a painter who in the course of her development, has examined additional and expanded spaces, inhabiting them with paintings and objects—both objets trouvés and self-made objects. This development culminated up to now in the mentioned exhibition On the Edge of Time (2022), in which she unfolded her work in 25 (!) rooms of Villa Arconati-FAR in Milan, as well as in the latest collaborative, ongoing project Passage — in the wake of the world (2023–present), which brings together painting, dance, and music.
Angela Lyn is a political artist (which she herself denies), in the true sense of the word: politics, from the Greeks onward, concerns the res publica, meaning: what affects everyone—the society, the community. Political art understood in this way has nothing to do with the great majority of today’s political art which turns art into an instrument of political struggle (keyword: activism, agit-prop). Which does not recognise nor acknowledge the potential, the power, and the explosiveness of art as art.
Angela Lyn’s feu sacré, the fiery nucleus of her artistic work, does not either lie in art itself (keyword: l’art pour l’art) nor in the still widespread European and U.S. notion of the artist who, as being solely motivated by individual self-realisation, ‘creating from within’, without questioning how what is found inside entered (keyword: cult of genius). In contrast to these three positions, her work engages artistically with the great, urgent, and unresolved questions and themes of our time: the nature-human relationship, the isolation and loneliness of today’s individuals and how to overcome this, the building of sustainable relations, the all-encompassing acceleration, the act of remembering and its relevance for our future, and questions about communication in relation to the changed perceptions of different groups and generations.
In other words, these are today’s burning questions of “the greatest of all arts, the art of living” (Bertolt Brecht), which concern the artist deeply. Lyn’s choice of themes, her responsibility as an artist, her material and media experimentation and her artefacts make her art—as art—a significant voice at the forefront of our time. Her artistic practice she understands as an «enquiry», an examination into these urgencies and their ambiguities. And the results of such enquiries— her artworks, the “discoveries”—as offerings (in the sense of Jacques Derrida’s “gift” – le don in French) to a curious, alert, and perceptive audience.
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From painter to silk installation artist? Moreover, using her own paintings of the mountains and the Himalayan cedars in front of her studio in Lugano (Switzerland), digitally printed onto silk panels that are then interrupted, cut up, and reassembled as art? Silk installations as nicely intended, but mediocre copies of paintings? Makeshift solutions created from the above constraints and necessities?
Not at all. Because the artist seriously engages with the different materialities of the material and medialities of the medium, in this case paintings and silk—with their “stubbornness/obstinacy» (Eigensinn in German and, as a loan word, also in English). She works with them both, exposes herself to them. Her silk works stand as independent artworks. Equal alongside and with the few paintings presented. Angela Lyn was able, as she realised (anew) during the creative process, to draw upon a long-standing experience with silk, as she explains in her artist’s statement from inside out and outside in – layering time.
“Eigensinn/obstinacy” — what would the obstinacy of material and the obstinacy of media be without the obstinacy and sharpness of the artist? An artist is subject to the obstinacy inscribed in materials and media. At the same time, the artist tries persistently as an obstinate author to bend the obstinacy of material and media to his/her own purposes. From this never-ending, unresolved process art has always gained its themes, aesthetics, and future. All materials and media share the fact that they have different potentials and limits, and in this manner, the respective artworks in painting, installation, film, theatre, etc., complement each other.
From the point of view and from the practice of an artist, the obstinacy of paintings manifests itself in the material’s own life (canvas, pigments, brushes, paints of various types, such as oil, acrylic, etc.). From the point of view of the audience, materiality and mediality of the painting mainly become evident in how it is perceived, or should be perceived: through the eyes, from varying distances, from different perspectives, at a maximum of 180 degrees (a view from behind is impossible), with a temporal dimension existing only in the viewer’s vision, scanning the individual painting, focusing on details, leaving them again, searching anew, or looking at the painting as a whole, etc.
In the case of the silk installations, the obstinacy of the material and medium manifests differently from the paintings: in the rustling flexibility of the silk and its “delicate movement” (Angela Lyn), in its transparency, in the manifold possibilities of folding and unfolding and thereby revealing and concealing the depicted, as well as in its many digital printing options. The audience must perceive the silk installations not only with the eyes and not only from the front, but also from behind and from the side. This means they must engage with the work with tension from different senses—visual, auditory (there is always at least a slight current of air in the room), tactile and haptic—and furthermore from 360-degree perspectives. The viewer must move between and through the choreographed silk panels, touch them, move them, and be moved by them, literally and figuratively. Temporality does not lie solely with the viewer; the installation itself, unlike a picture, is a choreographed temporal art form (like film, dance, or music), not a choreographed, condensed moment, frozen in time (like a painting).
Despite all the differences between painting and silk installations, some of the material and medial aspects play an equally important role in both art forms. For example, layering as a procedure, transparency and lightness in the double meaning of the word: brightness and lightness, or the question of movement/mobility within the artworks. It is this sustained engagement with the specific obstinacy of the material and medium of silk that makes Angela Lyn’s silk works autonomous artworks.
Thematically, the three exhibitions initially and obviously address questions of personal history and memory. However, less obviously, not from the perspective of a privatistic, fictionalized self-location, but from the perspective of agency for the future, agency that extends beyond the concrete person of Angela Lyn. The silk ghosts hanging on the walls—folded and unfolded differently, sometimes more, sometimes less recognisable—and the grandparents, parents, children, and grandchildren called up and invented in the letters are the «revenants», the returnees, as the French aptly refer to «ghosts». With and among them, and involving the audience, a conversation is initiated about a «world out of joint» (Shakespeare).
If the word were not overused and misused, “communication,” the connecting exchange, would probably be the appropriate word to name the artist’s perhaps central concern: an offer for diverse, sometimes contradictory, but always binding communication between generations, across worldviews and cultural imprints, for life, survival of all of us, in a fragile and fragmented world running out of time.
Lyn’s three silk works for China are also, and not least, an intercultural offering by the pluricultural English-Chinese-Swiss artist Angela Lyn. They are shaped by a biographical fundamental attunement— “I contain multitudes” (Bob Dylan, referring to Walt Whitman) – which is of decisive importance for the work of the three silk installations and their outcomes.
Xiamen, where Lyn’s family is from, was famously the starting point of the “Silk Road,” the most important international trade route for more than 1200 years (from 115 to the 13th century AD), along which different paths led to Europe, one of them also to northern Italy. Along this trade route, in addition to the eponymous silk, religions, cultures, and technologies were transported from East to West and vice versa.
In 2025, Angela Lyn returns to Xiamen-Gulangyu, with silk artworks produced in Italian Switzerland and northern Italy, in a journey back to the future. But this is no harmoniously or seamlessly closing circle; rather, it is a circle with a decisive, never closable opening: Angela Lyn’s silk installations are artworks that subtly recall and connect to the past after centuries of adaptations and transformations of silk art— “The past is never dead. It’s not even past” (William Faulkner)—and at the same time, critically, offer novel and different silk gifts for experiencing, living, and exchanging about our worldwide urgencies and vulnerabilities.
With regard to his readers, the German author and filmmaker Alexander Kluge, also well-known in China, stated at the beginning of his work History and Obstinacy (Geschichte und Eigensinn, in German): “There is no book that offers more than the chance to behave independently.” Kluge’s clear-sighted remark is an invitation and hope, insisting on an active reader. This applies equally to readers, listeners, and viewers of all art forms.
All substantial art requires an active recipient. Only through reception by viewers, readers, listeners, or visitors of installations does the potential of a substantial, sustainable, and resonant artwork unfold and realise itself. This also applies, and most certainly, to Angela Lyn’s Silk Works for China 2025.
Giaco Schiesser
Prof. em. for the Theories of Cultures and Media & for Artistic Research
Zurich University of the Arts, ZHdK / Switzerland