Time and Technology

Time is a central theme in Lin Hsin Hsin’s works, so much so that she titled one of her solo exhibitions From Time to Time, and published a volume of poetry with the same title. As a technologist, painter and musician, she was driven to engage with the scientific, aesthetic and philosophical dimensions of time. Artworks like Layers of Time and Sizzling Bubbles address the idea of the passing of time, while the paintings In Appreciation of Time and Ahead of Time are more contemplative expressions about humankind’s continuous quest to overcome the limitations of time despite their relatively brief existence on Earth. Time can also be a measure of her ambition. She strives to always be steps ahead of others, while thinking of ways to achieve her outcomes speedily without compromising on complexity. This way of thinking culminated in a seismic shift in Lin’s artistic practice, leading to her decision in 1994 to put down her paintbrush and compose artworks with a computer mouse instead. In 2012, she switched to only using her finger on a touchscreen device (with no stylus whatsoever), a method of artmaking that is still distinctively uncommon today. Lastly, technology has also allowed the artist to readily scale up her artworks without being held back by the limitations of file size. The digitally made painting Mountain View that you see here is in fact a tiny portion of the entire artwork, which according to her, stretches to 1.8 kilometres when fully displayed. She has even been able to map out all the subject matter ever presented in her artistic practice using a digitally constructed dendrogram, a technical term for a computer-generated diagram that shows hierarchical relationships between clusters of objects and data. This is displayed as a seven-metre-long wall mural in this exhibition.