Lin Tianmiao

“Mother’s!!!,” Lin Tianmiao’s latest exhibition, is not an adoring tribute or sentimental homage, but a damning depiction of aging and motherhood. Yet there is beauty amid the bleakness. Lin, one of China’s most eminent female artists, has transformed the gallery into a cavernous passage and covered its curved surfaces in swathes of silk. Warm lighting, soft textures, and organic lines save the all-white show from the stark sterility of the prototypical white cube. The scale of Lin’s work is remarkably intimate, the space a sort of womb.

The installation features a series of diminutive sculptures, figures of women whose headless bodies bear the mark of childbirth and age. Made from pristine white silk, the women are portrayed either cowering and crouching or lifeless and ravaged. One figure lies supine on an ironing board while two dogs hungrily hover, tongues wagging, ready to devour. Fashioned from a subtle brocade, the trio is draped with white hair that covers them like a sheet shrouding a corpse. Another figure sits hunched and dejected with long gray locks sprouting from her shoulders. A third has been torn in two: Small balls of thread spill from her halves, appearing ominously like parasitic eggs or tumors that have festered inside her. Despite such accursedness, “Mother’s!!!” is ambient, radiant, and transporting. Such contradictions are already implicit in the exhibition’s title: In Chinese slang, the term for “mother’s,” ma de, is also a swear word.