The Return – An Exploration of Identity and Belonging

An interview with Angela Lyn by Dong Xiaowei

Two exhibitions, floating roots, pieces of home, the return (Kulangsu Center of Contemporary Art, KCCA) and letters from the mists (Lin’s Mansion Art Space), are concurrently on display on Gulangyu, Xiamen. Curated by Li Zhenhua, the exhibitions feature collaborative works by Swiss artist Angela Lyn and Xiamen-based artist Guo Guozhu.

Angela Lyn is the great-granddaughter of Lin Erjia, founder of Shuzhuang Garden. Both her grandfather, Lin Dingli, and her father, Lin Wei-tze, were born and raised on Gulangyu. As her father pursued advanced studies in Britain during his youth and established a family there, Angela Lyn was born in the UK in the 1950s. She later emigrated to the United States with her family and has resided in southern Switzerland for the past three decades. Although she never lived on Gulangyu, she has always felt a deep affinity for the island. Upon curator Li Zhenhua’s introduction, Angela Lyn was invited by the Kulangsu Center of Contemporary Art to undertake a month-long residency on Gulangyu. With her recent silk work, she created two installations examining the overlap between memory and reality. While the work for the KCCA Red Hall carries a more public dimension, her work for the Lin’s Mansion Art Space, based on a series of letters to her ancestors printed on silk, leans towards the personal. During her residency, she lodged at the former Lin family residence—now the Lin’s Mansion Boutique Hotel. Immersed in the discoveries of her family heritage with its gardens, bathed in light from dawn to dusk, Lyn’s work unfolded organically.

Shuzhuang Garden, founded by Lin Erjia in the southern part of Gulangyu, nestles against the Sunlight Rock, facing the sea. For over a century, it has served as a venue for cultural gatherings of the Shuzhuang Poetry Society. As a true returnee (not merely in physical terms), Angela Lyn also returned to Shuzhuang Garden, to read her letters to her great-grandfather Lin Erjia and her parents in English, her native tongue—an act that transcended culture, time, and even life and death.

For Angela Lyn, the unexpected return to Gulangyu as an artist in the later stage of her life was a profound experience. She has perpetually sought avenues for dialogue: between China and Britain, East and West, past and future, tradition and contemporary, painting and installation, reason and emotion. She is no nihilist seeking to dismantle bridges to coherence; nor is she a complacent pluralist passively toying with diversity. She believes in the constructive power of subjectivity—that energy born from imagination and creativity. Throughout her fifty-year creative journey, this force has persisted with astonishing continuity. Her father’s conviction where there is no relationship, there is no meaning—has become almost an obstinate epistemology for her. As a result, her work consistently reveals broader worlds within the minutiae and continues to draw new viewers. The question whether to eat rice or potatoes was a perennial dilemma in Angela Lyn’s early family life. It led her to the consensus that we need not choose one over the other. She distances herself from simplistic dogmatism.

KCCA: Angela, welcome back to Gulangyu, a special place for the Lin family.

AL: My first memory of arriving on Gulangyu dates back to 2002, when I returned here with my 85-year-old father. At that time, although the Lin family’s residence was still standing, it was in a state of abandonment and ruin. In the meantime, it has been restored, and now, I am here, living within its walls, walking through the gardens, gazing at the trees, touching the bricks and stones. Although I did not grow up here, I feel “at home”. More significantly, returning with my art means to come back as my “truest self”.

KCCA: You were born in England, later moved to America with your family, and now reside in southern Switzerland. With your father being Chinese, you’ve been woven into multiple cultural backgrounds from the outset.

AL: Indeed. I was born in Windsor, England. My father was born on Gulangyu Island, to the well-established Lin family. He studied engineering at Tsinghua University before pursuing doctorate studies at the University of London. He belonged to that generation of Chinese youths from affluent families sent abroad to be educated. My mother came from the countryside in northern England. At nineteen, having met my father, she left her small village outside Derbyshire to plunge headlong into a completely unfamiliar culture. My parents had almost nothing in common. The palette of differences in my life was vast and widely spread. Moreover, I have two brothers: one who is perfectly normal, and the other who was autistic and never spoke. Growing up with such diversity, I was driven by one key question: how do we connect—regardless of who we are or where we come from?

KCCA: Is it about finding a common denominator?

AL: Yes, I would say so. I consciously seek effective languages that can bridge diverse cultures and communities. Coherence and understanding evolve from both a persistent enquiry into the relationship between things and a profound interest in grasping the whole. In seeking ways to examine this, I’ve spent much of my life observing trees—fascinated by how they maintain an overall form while constantly adjusting their branches.

KCCA: In this context, perhaps we should re-evaluate the definitions of terms like ‘coherence’ and ‘whole’.

AL: Growing up in a family where Eastern and Western cultures intersected, “duality” felt natural to me. But my enquiry was, and still is, where is the boundary between the two? Through my landscape paintings, I question where the sky ceases to be sky and becomes the mountain. Or are they fundamentally one? Between these two stances lies an undefined, malleable space—neither fully situated nor entirely unsettled. It is within this ambiguity that I look for a foothold, though one that defies precise pinpointing.

KCCA: Do you actively seek to explore Eastern culture? It comes to my mind to think of Isaiah Berlin, born in Russia, who later settled in Britain. Yet even during the Cold War, he repeatedly returned to the former Soviet Union, engaging in profound dialogue with the poets of the Silver Age—Mandelstam, Pasternak, Akhmatova, and others. He was fascinated by the Russian intellectuals’ understanding of the relationship between humanity and the world, a tradition stretching back to Tolstoy. Do you, too, harbour such curiosity about your cultural heritage?

AL: Eastern religions and philosophies offer alternative ways to explore and define reality through their understanding of life and the afterlife. For my ‘Chinese half’, conversing with my ancestors feels natural, triggering a rich world of imagery. For my ‘Western half’, the experience is somehow different. I am astonished how my Chinese heritage has entered my life despite being born abroad. It is like the rooting system of the banyan trees, returning to the soil, spreading into the cracks of my existence, between the layers, until I can no longer distinguish what comes from where.

KCCA: How do you allow the vast differences between East and West to coexist within your life? Or is it that, for you, humanity’s ultimate value lies in diversity, in being incommensurable and potentially conflicting?

AL: I never sought to resolve differences from the ‘either-or’ perspective, but rather to leave space for ambiguity: space for both, where differences enhance each other. Some questions should be left open, free from dogma or definition, like trees – silent inhabitants of the forest – shrouded in not-knowing. Maybe it is in this liminal space one can listen and discover common ground.

KCCA: Do people express interest in the distinctly Chinese elements within your work?

AL: When I was a young artist, people couldn’t always relate to the cultural hybridity that shaped my life. Though I collaborated with some excellent galleries early on and got off to a promising start, the ambiguity and duality in my work still confused the viewers. The impulsive energy in the work I did then was seen as contradictory to the poetic language palpable in my use of colour. I had grown up with an awareness of traditional Chinese painting and was deeply influenced by my Asian cultural background. It often happened that one aspect of my work was appreciated, while the other was put to question. Later, as Western interest in China grew, this changed. Elements once considered “decorative” began to be perceived as meaningful. I’ve always remained true to my search for a language in which both my cultural origins can coexist.

KCCA: This is perhaps the most precious freedom an artist can possess—to maintain continuity and authenticity in their artistic search.

AL: Indeed. I severed ties with renowned galleries to uphold this freedom and integrity, particularly when commercial interest prevailed over artistic substance.

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KCCA: Let’s discuss this exhibition. During the Song and Yuan dynasties, Quanzhou was one of the most important eastern ports along the Maritime Silk Road, while Xiamen later evolved into a significant trading hub.Vessels laden with tea, silk, porcelain, and other goods set sail from the East, traversing the Strait of Malacca, crossing the Indian Ocean, entering the Mediterranean, and reaching nations such as Italy. Now you return to Xiamen, to Gulangyu, carrying silk printed in Italy in a suitcase. This carries a strong metaphorical undertone.

AL: Having never truly known where I belong, the suitcase is an image of both transience and permanence for me. The silk was printed in a small village near Como in northern Italy. Having been Europe’s silk capital, the once thriving industry has now largely collapsed. Only a handful of workshops remain, and they are struggling to survive. The turnaround shows life is in constant flux.

KCCA: What were your feelings during the creation of the silk installations?

AL: The entire work was a trilogy of sorts: an overall concept with individual site-specific modulations. Creating the silk installations had ritual aspects. Acts of care. Unfolding each piece, ironing meter upon meter; preparing the panels for proper hanging—pressing the edges, positioning the pegs—a process that was both poetic and concrete. It also had something of a performance. In addition to the two installations for Xiamen, I also created a third installation for the Shanghai West Bund Art & Design Fair, where I had a solo booth with Lechbinska Gallery. Art fairs are often anonymous, but my ‘preparatory rituals’ somehow brought a distinct sense of presence forming a quiet counterpoint to this anonymity.

I was touched by the cleaning woman who stopped mopping to watch us prepare. Astonished to see us ironing the silks, she remarked, ‘It’s so beautiful.’ She came back frequently to see how the work was taking shape. I found her presence encouraging. One of my deepest aspirations as an artist is to connect authentically with different audiences.

KCCA: In architecture, materials can sometimes be essentialist—like bamboo for Vo Trong Nghia, paper for Shigeru Ban, or carbonized wood for Peter Zumthor. The material isn’t merely an extension of the structure; at times, it is the structure itself—a texture, an integral part of the space.

AL: Silk is ambiguous: both light and dense, fragile and resilient. It has something similar to oil paint, defying control. Oil paint is sensitive: every stroke leaves an indelible trace. Silk is similarly responsive: it responds to the slightest breath. Both require clarity and awareness to establish coherence between the idea and the materiality. Working with silk has also offered me a new means to express the poetic. Handling the material: folding, knotting, cutting, stitching, and aligning—has become an extended “act of painting”. To transform the silk into an immersive language with which one can physically engage, meant considering the light, the movement and interplay of the layers, forms, and composition, such that the viewer not only faces the work but also experiences it from the side, between, and behind. This was highly interesting.

KCCA: You’ve truly invested considerable time and effort into the silk.

AL: I believe for a work of art to resonate, it demands precisely this. In an era where we can digitally produce high-quality images, the physicality and presence of an artwork take on a new significance. Art remains one of the few ancient creative acts we can still do with our hands, retaining profound meaning and relevance. It has the much-needed potential to engage the body, mind, spirit, and heart. In the context of the digital era, particularly within the ever-expanding world of artificial intelligence, the act of creating art by hand carries an extraordinary “Eigensinn” – a stubbornness and meaning of its own. One that reflects our humanity.

KCCA: Correspondence with ancestors and poetry, as textual information, are also part of this exhibition.

AL: My first deeper engagement with my grandfather took place through the exchange of letters. At thirteen, seeking to connect with my ‘Chinese half’, I began sending him my poems. He replied with lengthy letters about the meaning of life. He was a spiritual man who enjoyed young people. After four years of important correspondence, we met for the first time. I was seventeen and travelled to Taiwan to meet him.

For my China project, I created fictional letters to my ancestors, based on stories I had grown up with, retold in a new context linking the past, present and future. When I read the letters out loud to my great-grandfather and my parents in the Shuzhuang Garden on Gulangyu, it felt as though my memory and imagination had been inverted—almost unimaginable, like a dream suddenly becoming reality. The experience was profoundly touching. I’m still processing the impact.

KCCA: Reality and fiction have been turned upside down. In truth, mere historical research cannot penetrate the depths of memory.

AL: Precisely. Human experience has no absolute measure: it is a highly individual intertwining of sensory experience, desire, fear, memory, and imagination. Art is a crucial means to articulate these ambiguous and nonlinear dimensions of our being—a means to deal with what we don’t know.

KCCA: I recall your exhibition project in Milan also incorporated textile elements through which you pose your questions.

AL: I have a lot of questions. In 2022, I had the opportunity to hold a major exhibition titled On the Edge of Time across twenty-five rooms of the four-hundred-year-old baroque Villa Arconati – FAR, on the outskirts of Milan. My starting point was: how to develop a body of work that connects life four centuries ago to the time we are in now. In one work, I created a written installation using old linens once belonging to my husband’s grandmother. The embroidered text hung in segments throughout the women’s wing corridor. It said: She woke early, hoping things would be alright: you never know nowadays, she was thinking to herself. Two weeks after I hung the installation, the war in Ukraine broke out.

KCCA: One questions whether we make progress, or not. It isn’t easy to arrive at a clear answer.

AL:In my letters from the mists, printed on 250cm-high silk panels, I posed this question to my great-grandfather, Lin Erjia: How do you see the world today? It was very interesting to envision this conversation with him.

The power of imagination should not be underestimated. What we envision can materialise. I am often struck by how a vision, step by step, can transform into a complete body of work—with its layers, details, and form—coalescing into a coherent whole. Even in the smallest ways, we are shaping our own paths.

KCCA: There will always be failures.

AL：But making art is a continuous dance with failure. As Samuel Beckett said, the key is to fail better.

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KCCA: What is your daily routine like in your Swiss studio? I recall seeing a photograph of you wearing blue overalls—is this your typical studio attire?

AL: When I arrive at the studio in the morning, I have certain habits, and the act of putting on my overalls is one of them—a kind of anchorage through daily ritual. The process of creating a work is often fraught with uncertainty, and these small repetitions can give me a sense of clarity and direction. Truth be told, I’m also a rather messy painter (laughs). When I’m fully immersed in the flow of painting, I smear paint on my overalls: stomach, legs, arms… At some point, they become encrusted with paint.

KCCA: They’re covered in traces of daily life.

AL: Yes. The overalls, along with the rags I use to clean my brushes, later become material for my installation work. I have a deep longing to imbue materials with meaning in our disposable world—these overalls, bearing the scent of paint, traces of use, and connectedness to the works, possess a unique lived-in quality. I also have a coat made from my painting rags; I adore this piece and use it for my performance art.

KCCA: Clothing was once intimately linked to rituals and specific moments in time.

AL: Yes, this has changed in our convenience-based lifestyle, whereby branded garments are mostly a matter of short-lived identity. A deeper meaning and relation to what we put on our bodies has disappeared. I try to rekindle this sense of relationship in my work.

KCCA: But hasn’t the use of found objects in art become somewhat trendy?

AL: The connection between concept, material, and form must, at best, withstand the test of time. I exercise caution in using found objects or materials in my installations: they undergo multiple trials before definitively entering my work. Time tells what ultimately works or not.

KCCA: How do you typically begin creating an artwork?

AL: For me, the first step in the creative process is having a vision driven by a specific inquiry—clear in essence but not yet formed. Writing helps me navigate these “unformed” layers as I find the visual language. I make very few corrections during the painting process. It is a slow act of building. The preparation comes before. I begin to paint when I am ready to mark the canvas. It is something like the moment when a leaf falls from a tree—light and precise at once.

KCCA: How do you view painting as a medium, particularly in an era where materials are increasingly diverse?

AL: I have been making art all my life. I feel grateful to be able to paint. It remains one of the few means of creating images that has withstood time. Indeed, nothing in painting is new. Yet it remains as challenging as ever for a painting to resonate inner substance and impact, and this over time. It is this sort of newness that interests me. In recent works, I’ve integrated painting, text, sound, video and performance into installation pieces. I embrace diverse media, but the way I use them stems from the same core explorations I make as a painter—an enduring enquiry into relationships, coherence, and taking the viewer beyond the obvious.

KCCA: Indeed, painting is a rare medium that can invite one to revisit a work. Does the risk of being defined as a traditional artist ever concern you?

AL: My art continually draws me towards a mode of observation that might be termed “traditional”. This isn’t about preserving antiquity, but rather about avoiding to be misled by the “new”. In an era where images can be artificially manufactured in seconds, our perceptions of reality and the sense of who we are transforming. Technology undoubtedly grants us a sense of near-omnipotence, but the truth remains we are bound to our physicality and finite nature. Thus, I cannot imagine a better era than this to be a painter. Leaving traces on canvas may even seem clumsy and absurd at this moment, yet painting still remains to be a wide-open gateway to human expression and understanding.

KCCA: Much like your observations of the cedar trees—painting never becomes tiresome.

Truly. The first painting I loved as a child was a Chinese ink work on silk of a monkey in a cedar tree. The image still lives in me. For 30 years, I’ve observed five Himalayan cedars outside my studio window in Lugano. Since 2008, I’ve painted my observations of the branches; both the trees and my perceptions have changed. This exploration includes my recent silk work, which makes the cedars seem to move. I never tire of these cedars. Careful looking reveals nothing is obvious.

Dong Xiaowei / 董晓葳
Curator, critic, and Editor-in-Chief of Chaojian Review; Academic Advisor of the Gulangyu Contemporary Art Center; Chevening Scholar. Dong’s practice is rooted in a long-term engagement with urbanism, architecture, and contemporary art. She approaches the interview as a form of discursive practice, viewing it as a generative encounter where the questioning actively engages with the interviewee’s presuppositions, enabling the co-creation of meaning.

Selected interviewees include:
Ryue Nishizawa, Yung Ho Chang, Xu Jiang, Steven Holl, Ma Yansong, Qiu Zhijie, Carlo Ratti, Liu Jiakun, Xie Yingjun, Seung H-Sang, Pilar Albarracín, Sou Fujimoto, Kazuhiro Kojima, Masahiro Harada, Vicente Guallart, Kris Yao, Huang Shengyuan, among others.

董晓葳

策展人、写作者，《潮间REVIEW》主编，鼓浪屿当代艺术中心学术顾问，英国志奋领学者。长期关注城市与建筑/当代艺术领域，主张以访谈作为话语实践，与受访者的前提预设碰撞，实现意义的共同生产。访谈对象包括：西泽立卫（Ryue Nishizawa），张永和，许江，史蒂芬·霍尔（Steven Holl），马岩松，邱志杰，卡罗·拉蒂（Carlo Ratti），刘家琨，谢英俊，承孝相(Seung H-Sang)，皮拉尔·阿瓦拉辛（Pilar Albarracín），藤本壮介（Sou Fujimoto），小岛一浩（Kazuhiro Kojima），原田真宏（Masahiro Harada），文森特·瓜尔里亚特（Vicente Guallart），姚仁喜，黄声远等。