Yanxiong Lin

Yanxiong Lin is a Chinese artist whose sculptural furniture and objects explore memory, nature and the emotional and cultural associations carried by materials.

Born and raised in Fujian, a coastal province in southeast China, Lin spent his childhood in the countryside with his grandmother. The surrounding landscape of sea, forests, mountains and wildlife formed his earliest relationship with the natural world and continues to influence the way he approaches form, texture and material. He began drawing at an early age and was introduced to plaster sculpture and traditional Chinese ink painting during childhood.

Lin entered the China Academy of Art in 2012 intending to study Fine Art, but instead enrolled in Product Design, specialising in furniture. The unexpected change proved formative, allowing him to develop across both design and fine art while studying art history, cultural history and material practice. After graduating in 2016, he worked across furniture, architecture and the gallery sector. In 2019, working for an organisation specialising in craft residencies brought him into close contact with international artists and their working processes, strengthening his decision to pursue an independent artistic practice. He subsequently moved to London to undertake an MA in Design at Central Saint Martins, graduating with distinction.

His first major series following Central Saint Martins, A Window to the Past, emerged from memories of his childhood and, in particular, his relationship with his grandmother. The collection considered experiences of loss and change following her diagnosis with Alzheimer’s disease and the destruction of the village in which she had raised him. The use of paper and natural lacquer also drew upon memories of making paper lanterns together during the Chinese Lantern Festival.

While autobiography provided the foundation for these early works, Lin’s practice has continued to expand. He describes archaeology as a methodology for thinking about design, examining the evolution of familiar objects and the histories embedded within them before reconstructing their forms through a contemporary sculptural language. His influences range from the monumentality of Brutalist architecture to Cubism and Surrealism, alongside the natural forms, animals and landscapes that have remained present throughout his work.

The evolution is visible across successive bodies of work. The lighter forms and lacquered surfaces of A Window to the Past have been followed by works including Serpentine and Elephant, in which carving and burning bring greater emphasis to the weight, texture and ageing of wood. His developing Babar series extends this language across chairs, stools, tables, lighting, benches and desks, allowing a growing vocabulary of forms to operate across different object typologies.

Across these works, Lin continues to investigate how an object can remain recognisable while resisting immediate interpretation: something encountered through memory and familiarity, but reconstructed into a form belonging unmistakably to the present.

His work is held in the permanent collection of the Shaanxi Opera House and Xi’an Concert Hall.