Lin Chih-hsin

Lin Chih-hsin (林智信, born July 16, 1936, Kuijen Township, Tainan, Taiwan) is one of the most important Taiwanese woodcut printmakers of the second half of the twentieth century, whose practice produced two record-setting works — the 124-meter woodcut print 'Celebrating Matsu' (1975–1995), recognized as the world's longest woodcut print, and the 248-meter oil painting 'Formosa the Beautiful' (1989–2014), recognized as the world's longest oil painting. His mature practice combines a bold, chiseled woodcut line with a sustained ethnographic interest in the religious festivals, market scenes, and rural ways of life of southern Taiwan.

Lin trained at the Art Teacher Training Department of the Taiwan Provincial Tainan Normal School (now National Tainan University), where his teacher Chang Lin-hsu introduced him to woodblock printmaking. Yang Yuyu, then editor of Fengnian (Harvest) magazine, published his early prints and reinforced his commitment to woodcut as his principal medium.

'Celebrating Matsu' is Lin's principal work. Composed across twenty years of fieldwork documenting religious processions in Tainan and built up from sixty-eight smaller print panels, the 124-meter water-based woodcut scroll captures the grandeur of the Matsu pilgrimage festival and has been recognized as the world's longest woodcut print. Completed in 1995, it subsequently toured internationally, including to Japan (Meiji University), Lithuania, and Latvia. Its monumental scale and documentary-ethnographic ambition set Lin's practice apart from the conventional small-format woodcut.

The oil-painting scroll 'Formosa the Beautiful: Images of Taiwan in the 1950s' (1989–2014), recognized as the world's longest oil painting, extends his ethnographic visual project into another medium and reflects his admiration for the French painter Pierre Bonnard. Across his career Lin worked not only in woodcut and oil painting but also in Cochin (Koji) pottery and sculpture.

His exhibition record places him among the most internationally circulating Taiwanese artists of his generation. Between 1973 and 1983 the National Museum of History invited him to participate in exhibitions in France, the Netherlands, South Korea, Japan, the United States, Uruguay, West Germany, and Australia, and in 2002 he was included in the Cambridge International Biographical Centre's Who's Who in the 21st Century. He lived and worked in Tainan until his death in December 2025.

Lin's prints are held in the collections of the Taipei Fine Arts Museum, the National Taiwan Museum of Fine Arts, Meiji University (Tokyo), the M. K. Čiurlionis National Museum of Art (Lithuania), and the National History Museum of Latvia, among others; the National Museum of History alone holds more than 160 of his prints.