Artist and works

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Li Xianting

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Since the beginning of the 1990s in Guangzhou, the first coastal city in southern China to be opened up, the artistic collective called the Big-Tail Elephant Group has been very active. The group consists of Xu Tan, Lin Yilin, Chen Shaoxiong and Liang Juhui. They do not hold a unified artistic viewpoint, but their common unwavering pursuit of art unites them in a city where desire and money prevail. 

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Lin Yilin follows closely the urban Chinese population and the rapidly changing living environment. He uses the nuances of the urban living space as the starting point for his works, employing basic building materials, like bricks, and the most elementary of human motions such as standing, crawling, kneeling, walking and lying down. He also includes money, a reference to the dominating object of human survival needs. These three factors constitute the main features of his works. Simple brick walls embody his ideas about man's dilemmas concerning survival.

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Lin Yilin's strength lies in his comprehensive experimentation with modern and contemporary approaches to artistic  expression, to which he introduces elements from architecture, installation, action art, to include audience  participation. The combination is realized in sculptural form, thus extending the conventional concept of sculpture.

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Lin Yilin studied sculpture at Guangzhou Academy of Fine Art and maintains a great interest in the relation between sculpture and architecture. His sculptural works echo architectural form, which is why bricks are a