Lin was born in Tokyo, Japan in 1964. Until the age of eight, he lived in an old family house in Wufong. In 1973, he went to United States for education, awarded with his bachelor degree of art at Otis Art Institute of Parsons School of Design in 1990. He was further awarded with Master of Fine Arts at Art Center College of Design in Pasadena, California in 1993. Born in a family that has profoundly related with contemporary history of Taiwan, Lin chose to move back to Taiwan in 1993, and based at the then Alternative Spaces such as IT Park, while receiving attention from the art industry.

During his time at IT Park, Lin has participated varies of works in art management and design, at the same time communicated with different artists on matters such as Avant-garde and experimental arts. Nonetheless, the concepts of contemporary art have not been quite prevailed during the time. Hence it always intrigued Lin in terms of how to utilize appropriate media and symbols as to achieve communication. In 1996 at IT Park, Lin has held his 2nd individual exhibition “Interior” which attempted to flip the cultural concepts of public/private area, by moving personal belonging such as rug in his house into the exhibition space, which transformed into a domestic house via the artistic ritual. Through this series of experiments, he discovered the traditional pattern of printed calico would create amazing chemistry with participants as form of media. Deeply rooted within local culture, such old-fashioned calico was not just symbol with profound implication that related with home experiences of many Taiwanese people, but more often, it seemed rather like a reenactment of collective memory, which rendered the so-known Taiwanese Subjectivity with inference that was able to be related.

Utlizing the traditional calico cloth in Taiwan, Lin has brought new life into it, while exposing strong feelings toward the land itself. When the calico cloth that should have been used as decoration of domestic object is enlarged and installed into pubic space, it begets a new meaning upon the objects original belong to private space, and bridging between different contexts. The concept of“ home” implies contemplation upon the cutlrual identifying experience, and corresponding to the trend of time that reconstructs the subjectivity of Taiwan.

During the unpredictable post-martial-law-promulgation period, when the feelings related to the land return to the focus of artists groups, the discovery of patterns of printed calico has broadened Lin’s artistic career, along which the implications of these “patterns” had become sophisticated and ambiguous as his artistic language further concise in numerous forms of the calico chosen in his different projects. It might not be incorrect as to state that, one of the peculiarities of art always involves sense of “the Midas touch” to some level, while the locations transformed by contemporary arts are no longer restricted to exhibition hall or walls, but the whole process of creation and the entire space was the objects that been arranged and touched by artists. For Lin, calicos function as strong, ritualized media that bridge the interaction between him and the entire artistic Space-time. Either the endogenous implication and the representation of objects, or the cultural pattern triggered by the graphical images could be comprehensively explanatory to Lin’s work. What he really has created for Taiwanese contemporary arts, is to bring the semi-graphic objects in line with the overall environment, with the indirect strength of aesthetics, he explores a new frontier for a gray yet abundant zone that is between divinity and mundaneness, between individual and aggregate beings, and between nostalgia and present time.

Taken place at the same time as the formation of his aesthetic approach is the idiosyncrasy of neo-popart that hidden in Lin’s work. For instance, he inputs textures of commodities and identity objects, such as those of passport, Taiwan beer, or standard school notebook onto the surfaces of different commodities and even buildings. Via such intentional transplantation of forms, Lin’s works have provided the viewers with an alternative angle to perceive the Consumer Culture and commodity fetishism.