Tan Lin

Tan Anthony Lin is an American poet, author, filmmaker, and professor. He defines his work as “ambient" literature, which draws on and samples source material from the Internet and popular culture to address issues involving plagiarism, copyright, and technology.[1]

Tan A. Lin
Born1957 (age 63–64)
Seattle, Washington
NationalityAmerican
EducationCarleton College
Columbia University
Known forPoetry, filmmaking
Notable work
HEATH (Plagiarism/Outsource), 7 Controlled Vocabularies and Obituary 2004: The Joy of Cooking
Style"Ambient" literature
Children1 (Ahn)

Early life and education

Lin was born in 1957 in Seattle, Washington, 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.[4] Tan Lin is the nephew of Lin Huiyin, who is said to be the first female architect in China.[5] Lin Juemin and Lin Yin Ming, both among the 72 martyrs of the Second Guangzhou Uprising, were cousins of his grandfather.[6] 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.[7] She is an American designer and artist who designed the Vietnam Veterans Memorial in Washington, D.C.[8]

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.[1][9]

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."[10]

The first official published work by Lin was Lotion Bullwhip Giraffe in 1996, a "meditation backwards," where he invents new poetry structures through the manipulation of the mechanics of language.[11] In 2003, Lin published his second work, Blipsoak01, where he 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.[12] Less than a year later, he 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 he continues his inventive poetry structure again, this time through the style of "a field guide to the arts."[13] Most recently, in 2011, he published Insomnia and the Aunt, in which he mourns the death 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."[14] 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.[15]

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." He 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 ach 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 response to 7 Controlled Vocabularies and Obituary 2004: The Joy of Cooking was generally positive. Popular and controversial post-digital poet Kenneth Goldsmith said, "Lin proposes a radical idea for reading: not reading. Words, so prevalent today, are merely elements that constitute fleeting engagements."

The work was the winner of the Association for Asian American Studies Book Award in Poetry in 2012.[13]

Bibliography

Essays
  • Information Archives, the De-Materialization of Language, and Kenneth Goldsmith's Fidget and No. 111 2.7.93-10.20.96
  • Anachronistic Modernism, Cabinet, Winter 2000/2001
  • Warhol's Aura and the Language of Writing, Cabinet, Fall 2001
  • Boredom and Nonsense in Wonderland, Introduction, Notes, and For Further Reading, Alice's Adventures in Wonderland and Through the Looking Glass, Barnes and Noble Classics, 2004
  • Eric Baudelaire's Sugar Water, the Deleuzean Event, and the Dispersion of Spectatorial Labour, Reading Room, February 2008
  • Disco as Operating System, Part 1, Criticism, Winter 2008
  • PLAGIARISM: A response to Thomas Fink, Otoliths, June 2009[16]

Published works
  • Lotion Bullwhip Giraffe, 1996
  • BlipSoak01, 2003
  • ambience is a novel with logo, 2007
  • Kruder & Dorfmeister, 2007
  • Heath (Plagiarism/Outsource), 2007
  • 7 Controlled Vocabularies and Obituary 2004: The Joy of Cooking, 2010
  • Blurb, 2010
  • Purple/Pink Appendix, 2010
  • Insomnia and the Aunt, 2011

Art exhibitions
  • Automasters, 1999
  • Poetry Plastique, 2001
  • Between Language and Form, 2002
  • 27 Merging Artists, 2002
  • One Place and the Other, 2002
  • Code Residue, 2005
  • The Baghdad Batteries, 2010
  • The Evryali Score, 2010

Public art projects
  • Itinerant Gastronomy, 1996
  • The Echo Variations, The Edge of Summer Cleans Autumn, 1998
  • Cleveland Public Library Project, 1998
  • "Flatness", 2001
  • Input, 2004
  • Chinese Chalk in a Parking Lot, 2009
  • TwitterChalk, 2009

Film, theatre, and video works
  • Calendar the Siamese, 1996
  • Poetry in Uniforms, 1996
  • Dub Version, 2002
  • Eleven Minute Painting, Reading Module v. 01, 2002
  • Poni Hoax, 2005
  • Disco Eats Itself, 2007

Awards
  • Danforth Foundation Nominee, 1979
  • Mademoiselle Poetry Prize, 1979
  • Gertrude Stein Award for Innovative American Poetry, 1984 and 1986
  • Bennett Cerf Award, Columbia University, 1985
  • Van Rensselaer Award for Poetry, 1986
  • Academy of American Poets Honorable Mention, Columbia University, 1987
  • President's Fellow, Columbia University, 1990
  • The Pushcart Prizes, Honorable Mention for Fiction, 2004
  • J. Paul Getty Visiting Scholar Fellowship, The Getty Trust, Los Angeles, 2004
  • Asian American Arts Alliance Urban Artist/Initiative/NYC Grant, 2006-2007
  • Andy Warhol Foundation/Creative Capital Arts Writing Grant, 2006-2007[9]
  • Foundation for Contemporary Arts Grants to Artists award (2012)

References
  1. "Tan Lin : The Poetry Foundation". www.poetryfoundation.org. Retrieved 2015-10-05.
  2. Paul Berger (November 5, 2006). "Ancient Echoes in a Modern Space". The New York Times. Retrieved January 2, 2009.
  3. Finding Your Roots, February 2, 2016, PBS
  4. Rothstein, Edward. "Maya Lin". The New York Times. Retrieved January 2, 2009.
  5. Peter G. Rowe & Seng Kuan (2004). Architectural Encounters with Essence and Form in Modern China. MIT Press. ISBN 978-0-262-68151-3.
  6. Donald Langmead (2011). Maya Lin: A Biography. ABC-CLIO. p. 5. ISBN 978-0-313-37854-6.
  7. Berger, Paul (2006-11-05). "Ancient Echoes in a Modern Space". The New York Times. ISSN 0362-4331. Retrieved 2015-10-05.
  8. Rothstein, Edward. "Maya Lin". The New York Times. Retrieved 2015-10-04.
  9. Lin, Tan. "Tan Anthony Lin CV" (PDF). Retrieved 2015-10-12.
  10. "BOMB Magazine — Tan Lin by Katherine Elaine Sanders". bombmagazine.org. Retrieved 2015-10-05.
  11. "Poet's Sampler: Tan Lin | Boston Review". bostonreview.net. Retrieved 2015-10-07.
  12. "(2007) Tan Lin | HEATH, prelude to tracing the actor as network | Danny Snelson (2010-2014)". aphasic-letters.com. Retrieved 2015-10-12.
  13. "UPNEBookPartners - Seven Controlled Vocabularies and Obituary 2004. The Joy of Cooking: Tan Lin". www.upne.com. Retrieved 2015-10-12.
  14. Fink, Thomas. "Tan Lin, plagiarism/outsource". otoliths. Retrieved 2015-10-04.
  15. "HEATH COURSE PAK by Tan Lin | HTMLGIANT". htmlgiant.com. Retrieved 2015-10-12.
  16. "Electronic Poetry Center". epc.buffalo.edu. Retrieved 2015-10-05.
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