For Lin Yan, paper, often joined with ink, enabled explorations of minimalist form and feeling as well as philosophic meditations on harmony and balance. But in time, her relationship with paper shifted toward a distinctly cultural narrative. She implicitly identifies with Xuan paper3 both as a native material linked to Chinese culture and as one of the four treasures of the study, the chosen paper for literati ink painting, poetry, and calligraphy.4 Wielding paper, Lin Yan expands modernist expression, but also secures her ties to place and home. Despite coming of age in the turbulent era of the Cultural Revolution, Lin Yan (林延, b. 1961) was firmly rooted within a family of painters who are attributed with the development of modernism in China. This lineage reveals the enormous importance of painting in shaping Lin Yan's later engagement with paper. Lin Yan's maternal grandparents Pang Xunqin (Hiunkin Pang 厐薰琹, 1906–1985) and Qiu Ti (Schudy丘堤, 1906–1958) infused new life into the Chinese painting tradition by introducing ideas of Western modernism. Pang cofounded the Storm Society (Juelanshe 决澜社) in 1931, launching China's first modern art association. Working earnestly as artist, educator, and researcher, he later merged painting with decorative arts and native design, and established China's first institution devoted to design in 1956.5 Also a pioneer, Lin Yan's grandmother, Qiu Ti, is recognized today as both one of China's first female modern painters and an artist who challenged conventions, particularly through expressing the personal and the private in her work. Lin Gang (林岗, b. 1925) and Pang Tao (厐壔, b. 1934), Lin Yan's parents, along with her maternal uncle Pang Jiun (厐均, b. 1936), are also celebrated painters. Lin Yan's father became a prolific painter who, in 1951 at age 26, produced the canonical painting Zhao Guilan at the Heroes Reception (Qunyinghui shang de Zhao Guilan 群英会上的赵桂兰), garnering a prestigious national award for its tribute to the Maoist era. A trailblazer like her mother Qiu Ti, Pang Tao appropriated abstraction as a new lens through which to view Chinese subject matter. The 1998 exhibition Lin Yan co-curated with Liu Meilin, Three Generations of Chinese Modernism, showcased Qiu Ti's works and her abiding painterly connection with her daughter and granddaughter.6 Lin Yan spent her childhood in the company of painters in her own family and among other artists, all of whom lived in a communal housing compound affiliated with Beijing's elite Central Academy for Fine Arts (CAFA), where her parents taught. The compound stood next to the art school in its former location of Xiaowei Hutong in Wangfujing, Dongcheng district, the cultural heart of Beijing. While living conditions during this era were bleak, Lin Yan relates with nostalgia how well suited the lifestyle was. She and other children played in an urban courtyard where the families grew vegetables, grapes, and sunflowers, and raised birds, rab- bits, and chickens. As if in The Secret Garden, Lin Yan could slip through a door off the courtyard into an extended playground on the grounds of the art academy. Living amongst a host of painters, Lin Yan found the medium a natural form of expression.7 She painted effortlessly as a child, producing paintings that were unprecedented when she was only twelve. At sixteen, Lin Yan's parents arranged formal painting lessons for her, and before she entered university, she spent a year painting intensively. Attracted to such Western masters as Rembrandt and Vermeer, she surrounded herself with classical subject matter. In 1981, when she joined CAFA's oil painting department, she enjoyed privileged access to library resources through her parents' affiliation. Whereas other students were prohibited from viewing resources featuring non-realistic artworks, Lin Yan was able to peruse faculty-reserved books ranging from German expressionism to Kandinsky's convergence of color and music. She quietly fed her appetite for abstract art on the pages of her sketchbook while she received orthodox training in the painting department, producing nudes and still lifes. Despite Lin Yan's access to additional resources at CAFA, the conservative, State-run art academy in China's early years of reform and opening up impeded her development as an independent artist. As Lin Yan's interest in abstract art deepened, her father encouraged her to "use two legs to walk": toeing the line of Stateendorsed realism to ensure she would land a job, while indulging in her interest in abstraction and doing what she loved. In 1985, soon after graduation, like her mother and the other painters in her family before her, all of whom had studied abroad, she left for a year at the painting atelier of L'École national supérieur des Beaux- Arts in Paris. Once there, she discovered the academy was no less burdened by the conventions of European classical painting than China was with its own painting traditions. But Paris nevertheless shifted Lin Yan's perspective. Her exposure to contemporary art at the Centre Pompidou kindled a desire to reach New York, where she could experience the contemporary art scene firsthand. Instead of returning home like her relatives, she moved on. In 1988 she completed an MFA at Bloomsburg University in Pennsylvania (a destination that had appeared close enough to New York City on an old Chinese map of the United States) and settled in Brooklyn. By then, Lin Yan was already on her way to expanding painting from a fixed piece to a holistic composition that fostered harmony with the surrounding environment. While still at the École des Beaux-Arts, Lin Yan took a materials course on experimentation that, in retrospect, she recognizes contributed to her consideration of Xuan paper as a solution to the restrictions she perceived in painting. At the time, however, she had no reference for old and new materials in Western art in order to appreciate the course's objective. Only after she was liberated  from the painting conventions of China and Europe did she begin to experiment by devising three-dimensional relief-like structures for her paintings. As she delved into sculptural forms to merge her work with space, she determined that she had to simplify her painterly content. After a phase in which she limited her expression to variations on black, she drew further from the Chinese yinyang, dark-light aesthetic by pairing black ink with the luminescence of Xuan paper. Xuan paper, like ink, Lin Yan discovered, had a lot to say. Materially speaking, she felt Xuan could articulate new dimensions of expressiveness and form beyond other modernist materials such as iron, steel, glass, concrete, or plastic.8 Indeed, she found it to be a smart material with the multiple facets she had sought: resilient yet soft and delicate, its composition was inherently complex; handmade, it supported ecological and humane practices, but bore stunning longevity; recyclable, it could be reworked; and its translucence permitted interaction with light. Additionally, it was intricate enough to sustain works mounted on the wall yet sufficiently modest for sweeping installations hung from the ceiling. It absorbed, held, and accentuated ink from traces to saturation. It retained its sheer flatness, held a crimp or a fold, and fluttered seductively in the air. In short, Lin Yin found Xuan paper's versatility unmatched, enabling her to color, combine, layer, and suspend it to create provocative pieces. Her explorations of Xuan paper's virtuosity gradually turned to handmade mulberry-bark paper, pizhi 皮纸. She expanded her working range of natural shades, textures, and thicknesses through such variations particularly evident in yunlong pizhi 云龙 皮纸 and qingdi yunlong 清底云龙 varieties. Pizhi's alluring deckle edge and overall tactile quality, with its irregular fibrous surface, further appealed to Lin Yan's sensibility. Unlike many artists creating paper works today, she embraced paper's inherent nature. In reference to the material, she explains, "I try to make paper look like itself."9 In many ways, Lin Yan's installation Sky 天, with its all-embracing title, represents a consummation of her interest in Xuan paper and ink—a perfect balance of the pure qualities of these two elements. Lin Yan's appropriation of paper as her central medium, along with her distinctive use of it, marked a radical departure from her previous work. She humorously relates the story of her father's early encounter with her paper works: when gallerists so gently packed them for shipping, he told them not to worry as it was only crumpled paper. Indeed, paper's early and heavy use as a vehicle in China for woodblock printing and publishing confined it to being treated as a utilitarian product. Even with Xuan paper as the essential companion to Chinese painting and calligraphy, most artists in Lin Yan's generation still cannot extricate it from the domain of the craftsman who produces it. But, immersed in New York's contemporary art world, Lin Yan's mind could separate the familiar material from its cultural conventions. Her remoteness enabled her to look beyond paper's stock role as flat, trimmed, and bound sheets in the service of text and image; instead she could explore paper as the form in itself, a viable form, vested with its own layers of history and meaning. She consciously appreciated the material for what it was historically, one of China's finest inventions attributed with the transmission of culture. In her modern urban life, she could also appreciate handmade paper as a manifestation of Chinese cosmology. Developed over the centuries by humans who comprehended ecological conditions and harnessed the combined properties of China's abundant natural fibers and spring water, paper proved the synergy of nature and humans. For Lin Yan, paper transcends its use value to signify a spiritual place that she has sought while grappling with her own unstable position as a transcultural, migrant Chinese artist. She feels an abiding connection to the Chinese paper she uses. Lin Yan's consciousness of her native home shifted further upon her return to Beijing in 1993 after nine years away. As Beijing awaited the outcome of its first Olympic bid that year, it inaugurated a new plan to overhaul urban development. The city government had already set in motion the notorious destruction of traditional hutong structures with their characteristic gray brickwork, colorful tiling, and intimate courtyards. Plans to relocate CAFA from its Xiaowei Hutong location further spelled the demise of what Lin Yan viewed as her home. This was akin to Chinese art historian Michael Sullivan's observation about her grandfather Pang Xunqin and other artists' return to Shanghai from Paris in the 1920s—"reconciliation of East and West was not a matter of technique, but of vision and feeling. To them, their sense of alienation from their own society was often a spur."10 Lin Yan processed the destruction as the loss of a vital connection to her past. After her initial homecoming, Lin Yin immersed herself in what she calls her "black decade," as she explored the cultural ruins of her home through black inks, paints, pencils, and pastels. But as the essence of Beijing continued to erode with massive urban development, Lin Yan's trips back inspired further meditation on her home and, increasingly, native papers became the medium that captured her experience. Rather than using paper to record text and or print images, she opted to create paper mold casts to record the physical remnants of home through fleeting architectural elements. Architecture, in fact, had long been an interest of Lin Yan's with her consciousness of form. So she began to take impressions of architectural details like curved ceramic roof tiles, the quintessential element of multilayered roofs that have characterized Chinese architecture for centuries. While city planners embraced modern forms, methods, and materials, Lin Yan's architectural conservation pieces in paper stood as unbending proposals to retain the old in the new. With her burgeoning interest in Xuan and pizhi, she began to use the transformative layers of strong but soft Xuan paper sheets to cast impressions of other cultural remnants in what became for her a ritualistic practice. Her method relied on the traditional technique for mounting scrolls of diluting glue with water and applying the mixture to the limited areas of the paper where she would later make an impression. She would then press the paper layers tight to ensure that no air remained between the dampened sheets, so that they would not separate over time, and proceed to take an impression. The number and types of sheets layered varied, depending on the total effect she sought. This process ensured that molds of the bricks of hutong structures that surrounded her as a child, for instance, stubbornly left a lasting impression in layers of paper, untreated at their edges and fluttering irresistibly in the open air. Curiously, paper became her medium to play out contradictions— the soft, pliable, and delicate capturing the solid and rough. This is no small irony against the modernist obsession with industrial concrete, ceramics, and metals. There is also irony in her demonstration that China's paper craft could still stand in to transmit culture. Alone once again in her Brooklyn studio, Lin Yan would later reflect on her trips back to Beijing. She seized upon the presence of her studio's bolted metal-plate flooring as a historic remnant from the ice factory that the space once was, and she molded meditative companion pieces to the cast paper relics of her Beijing home. Lin Yan has charted other losses on her returns to Beijing. More absolute than the bulldozing of Beijing's cultural heritage has been the despoliation of the environment, cosmologically speaking, from the heavens to the earth: air, soil, water. For Chinese artists instilled with a reverence for nature through the primacy of the landscape painting tradition, the degradation of China's environment posits a vexing question. Various contemporary artists have dealt with this contradiction cleverly enough by composing works that appear from afar as classical landscapes; up close the natural forms are composed of garbage and other detritus of human consumption. The now infamously documented January 2013 Air Quality Index readings that registered unprecedented statistical evidence of Beijing air pollution posed a deeper challenge to artists. How could they capture the physical and spiritual enormity of what could now be confirmed as severe and chronic air pollution? Like litmus paper serving as an objective measure, Xuan paper, with its neutral shades and fibrous absorption, became Lin Yan's medium to explore this question. She proceeds to apply ink to paper, creating what amounts to aesthetically alluring but viscerally unpleasant effects on the layers. The perversity of Lin Yin's conceptualization comes to the fore as her use of ink appears to adulterate the revered, handmade Chinese paper. Playful yet damning, My Village (2014) ties the devastation to her ancestral home, whereas other works with titles such as Gasp, Cloud, Breath, Inhale, and Exhale can be read as physical evidence of air pollution's desecration of purity, beauty, and harmony. As they adhere to the wall, like inconclusive results of respiratory tests, these works of uncertain layers of variously tainted paper portend the unknown impact of pollution many years hence. In some pieces, the free-flying edges of paper waver in the air like the control litmus, a reminder of the natural, the uncorrupted. For Beijingers and other Chinese me- ga-city dwellers, there is particular irony in how these installations seem to aestheticize the industrial foam of the doctor-recommended N95 Respirator facemasks that blacken with ambient soot and toxic particulate matter when worn on particularly bad air days. And for those who understand the papermaking process, Lin Yan implies that the deleterious impact of pollution affects not only humans but also the balance of the earth embodied in traditional, high-quality paper, produced from healthy plant fibers and clean water. Her position is not unlike that of her contemporary Xu Bing (徐冰, b. 1955). He proposes that China's and the world's current environmental crisis might begin to be rectified by looking to the hand papermaking process, dependent as it is on the dual workings of the bounties of a clean environment and deep human knowledge of these materials and their behavior. In other words, like paper, the survival of humanity depends on a balanced negotiation with our environment. Lin Yan dwells on this reality, but in such a galvanizingly beautiful way that we go back for pleasure in the pain. Before her migrations sensitized her to new perspectives on art and life, Lin Yan was at home in the domain of painting. Methodologically, it is important to consider that, for all of her focus on paper itself, it still serves her as a painting surface. In subtle but daring acts, she has taken the treasured elements of Chinese painting—Xuan paper and ink—and overturned the static Chinese painting tradition to assert a minimalist conceptualization of painterly expression. She transcends the rules of Chinese ink painting by enabling paper to speak for its own qualities, not in flat dimensionality but with threedimensional body. And in that practice she has found a new home that integrates the new and the old that she could not yet identify as a young artist in Paris. In this sense, it is no coincidence that Lin Yan's husband, Wei Jia (韦佳, b. 1957)—like her, both a painting student at CAFA and a migrating Beijing–New York artist—also uses Xuan paper in his works, through a nuanced process of painting paper strips and collaging them on canvas. While painting occupied a superior position as fine art throughout Lin Yan and Wei Jia's academic training in China, it is telling that the virtuosity and beauty of the paper in their works invoke response in us today. David Revere McFadden observed, "We take \[paper\] for granted, and therein lies its appeal as an art medium. Its true value is discovered only in its transformation."11 But Lin Yan discovered paper's true value both in its transformative properties as well as in paper as a Chinese medium— rife with cultural meaning. The author wishes to acknowledge Lin Yan, for her generosity of time and thoughtful commentary, and April Vollmer, for introducing her to Lin Yan in 2013. Thanks also to Fou Gallery in Brooklyn and Art Beatus in Vancouver and Hong Kong for their support of this article. ___________ notes 1. David Revere McFadden, "Slash: Paper Under the Knife," in Slash: Paper Under the Knife, exhibition catalog (New York: Museum of Arts and Design, 2009), 11. 2. Lin Yan, interview by Liu Libin, MSN Live, 2006. First published in the exhibition catalog Visible/Invisible (Beijing: One Moon Contemporary, 2006). 3. Whereas the character for xuan paper remains the same regardless of its usage in Chinese, in English it may be referred to as Xuan, indicating both a type of paper and the geographical region in Anhui province in which this paper is produced, or in the lowercase form as xuan, denoting the paper as a specific variety. I have opted for the use of Xuan as a proper noun in keeping with Lin Yan's own reference to it, which retains both its geographical origin and the referent to the specific variety of paper. 4. In this tradition, paper, brush, ink, and ink stone are said to comprise the four treasures of the study (wenfang sibao 文房四宝). 5. When the academy opened in 1956, it was known as the Central Academy of Craft Arts (Zhongyang gongyi meishu xueyuan). By 1999, the school had merged with Tsinghua University and is now officially known as The Academy of Arts & Design of Tsinghua University. 6. The Hong Kong–based gallery Art Beatus held the exhibition "Three Generations of Chinese Modernism: Qiu Ti, Pang Tao, Lin Yan" (三代中國女藝術家： 丘瑅， 龐壔，林延) at their Vancouver gallery, April 22–May 30, 1998, as a window into the development of twentieth-century Chinese art. The gallery published a catalog by the same title. 7. The showcasing of her early oeuvre of paintings on her extensive website underscores how central the medium was to her formation as an artist. For images of her early to current works, see: http://www.linyan.us (accessed September 1, 2014). 8. Although Lin Yan knows the papermaking process, she neither makes her own paper nor feels the need to have her paper custom made. A trip to the alleyway paper shops in Beijing's Liulichang neighborhood generally serves her needs. 9. Lin Yan, telephone interview with the author, May 25, 2014. 10. Michael Sullivan, The Meeting of Eastern and Western Art (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1989, 179. 11. McFadden, 11.   <

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