Tan Lin

Early life and education

Lin was born in 1957 to Chinese-American immigrants born in Shanghai, China, and Beijing, China. His parents migrated to the United States from China, his father in 1948 and his mother in 1949.^[2][3] His father, Henry Huan Lin was a ceramist and former dean of the Ohio University College of Fine Arts. His mother, Julia Chang Lin, born in Shanghai, was a poet and taught literature at Ohio University.^[1] Tan Lin is the nephew of Lin Huiyin, who is said to be the first female architect in China.^[4] Lin Juemin and Lin Yin Ming, both of which are among the 72 martyrs of the Second Guangzhou Uprising was a cousin of his grandfather.^[5] Lin Chang-min, a Hanlin of Qing dynasty, the emperor's teacher, was the father of Lin Hui-yin and great-grandfather of Tan. The Lin family moved to Athens, Ohio, and in 1959, Tan's sister, Maya Ying Lin, was born. She is an American designer and artist who designed the Vietnam Veterans Memorial in Washington, D.C.

Lin received a Bachelor of Arts in English from Carleton College in Northfield, Minnesota. He received his M.A. and Ph.D. degrees in English Literature from Columbia University in New York City. In addition to writing essays, poems, and books, Lin currently teaches creative writing at New Jersey City University. He has previously taught at the University of Virginia and the California Institute of the Arts, as well as brief stints at Columbia University and Brooklyn College.

Works

Lin's style as an artist comes from the principle of "ambient" literature. A commentary by Katherine Elaine Sanders described the style by saying "Lin leads his audiences in exploring the temporary ephemera that fills our daily interactions: emails, Twitter feeds, Facebook messages, blogs, movies, magazines, and advertisements, indexes, photographs, and recipes". The first official published work from Lin was Lotion Bullwhip Giraffe in 1996, a "meditation backwards," where Lin invents new poetry structures through the manipulation of the mechanics of language. In 2003, Lin published his second work, Blipsoak01, where Lin ones again uses inventive poetry structure, this time through the abstract visual placement of words. In ambience is a novel with a logo, Lin uses a subtitle system consisting of citations in the format of Google search entries. Less than a year later, Lin published HEATH, which also utilizes the same subtitle system as presented in ambience, but also focuses on language and graphics from various online sources. In 2010, Lin published 7 Controlled Vocabularies and Obituary 2004: The Joy of Cooking, where Lin continues his inventive poetry structure again, this time through the style of "a field guide to the arts". Most recently, in 2011, Lin published Insomnia and the Aunt, in which Lin mounrns the passing of his aunt who owned a motel in the middle of nowhere.

HEATH

In the project HEATH(Plagiarism/Outsource), Lin presents an accumulation of language and graphics from any kind of online source, ranging from advertisements to Facebook to scholarly articles. For Lin, it touches on "who is more generally responsible for certain texts", rather than touching "on who physically authors a text." He explores the idea of an ambient novel by highlighting how a book works and how a reader reacts to a printed object while the content itself is arguably meaningless. The content skips from subject to subject in a seemingly random way through plagiarisms, outsourced material, and meta-content.

7 Controlled Vocabularies and Obituary 2004: The Joy of Cooking

In 7 Controlled Vocabularies and Obituary 2004: The Joy of Cooking, Lin writes prose poems that are disrupted by itself, alluding to an idea of art being "relaxingly meaningless." Lin distorts the line between various aesthetic disciplines and takes avant-garde notions to a new level by diffusing them into ambient formats such as yoga or meditation. The seven sections of the book all take on a different art form, including photography, painting, the novel, architecture, music, theory, and film, through a format of both text and photographs.

The critical acclaim for 7 Controlled Vocabularies and Obituary 2004: The Joy of Cooking is generally positive. An endearing review from popular and controversial post-digital poet Kenneth Goldsmith says "Lin proposes a radical idea for reading: not reading. Worlds, so prevalent today, are merely elements that constitute fleeting engagements." It is also the winner of the Association for Asian American Studies Book Award in Poetry in 2012.