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 has produced two of the world's largest single artworks — the 124-meter long woodcut print 'Celebrating Matsu' (1975-1995) and the 248-meter oil painting 'Formosa the Beautiful' (1989-2014). His mature practice combines the chiseled bold-line vocabulary of Japanese postwar mokuhanga master Shikō Munakata with a sustained ethnographic interest in the religious festivals, market scenes, and rural ways of life of southern Taiwan.

The slug `lin-jen-hsin` may correspond to a romanization variant of Lin Chih-hsin's name; the kanji/hanzi is 林智信 in his canonical romanization but the orchestrator's slug uses 'jen-hsin' rather than 'chih-hsin', a variant that occurs occasionally in older Wade-Giles transliterations of similar Mandarin syllables. In the absence of a clearer disambiguator, this entry attaches to the well-documented printmaker Lin Chih-hsin, who is by far the most-cited Taiwanese woodcut artist of his generation.

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 the Chinese New Printing style of finely-incised monochrome woodblocks and where the magazine editor Yang Yuyu confirmed his commitment to woodcut as his principal medium. His practice reframed the technical inheritance from Chang Lin-shu through encounter with the work of Shikō Munakata, the Japanese mokuhanga master whose bold black-line iconography redefined Asian woodcut in the postwar period.

'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 grandiosity of the Matsu pilgrimage festival and has been recognized as the world's longest woodcut. The work was completed in 1995 and has subsequently toured to Lithuania, Latvia, Germany, Japan (Meiji University), and other international venues. The monumental scale and the documentary-ethnographic ambition place Lin's practice closer to the Mexican muralist tradition (in scope) than to the conventional small-format woodcut.

The 'Formosa the Beautiful' oil painting series (1989-2014) and the more recent 'Beautiful East Taiwan' series (begun 2014) extend his ethnographic visual project across other media. Lin has worked across woodcut, oil painting, ceramic (Cochin pottery, learned from Lin Tian-mu in 1988), sculpture, and glass — a sustained practice across all the principal Taiwan visual-arts media.

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 international exhibitions in France, the Netherlands, South Korea, Japan, the United States, Uruguay, West Germany, and Australia. In 2002 he was included in the Cambridge International Biographical Centre's Who's Who in the 21st Century, and his 1982 woodblock print exhibition at the National Museum of History earned an Honorary Gold Medal. He has served on the jury of several Taiwan art and printmaking exhibitions and continues to live and work in Tainan.

Lin's prints are 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.