Shue Chin Lin

Shue Chin Lin (Lin Hsueh-Ching; 林雪卿; born 1952, Taipei County, Taiwan) is a senior Taiwanese printmaker, educator, and arts administrator whose decades-long career has helped institutionalize contemporary printmaking education in Taiwan. She holds professorial positions at two universities, has served as Director of the Taiwan Printmaking Society and President of the Association of Taiwan Artist Today, and is a founding member of the Evergreen Graphic Art Association — three of the principal print-related organizations in twenty-first-century Taiwan.

Lin earned a B.F.A. from National Taiwan Normal University in 1975, joining the same generation of Taiwanese painters who studied during the period of Liao Shiou-Ping's first sustained efforts to bring contemporary printmaking education back to Taiwan. She subsequently traveled to Japan for graduate study at the University of Tsukuba — one of the few institutions in East Asia with a fully-fledged graduate printmaking program — and completed an M.F.A. in 1989. The choice of Tsukuba placed her directly in the lineage of Liao Shiou-Ping, who had taught printmaking there in the late 1970s. After graduate school she returned to Taiwan and began her academic career, currently holding professorial appointments at the Department of Visual Arts at the University of Taipei and at the Graduate School of Printmaking at the National Taiwan University of Arts.

Her studio practice centers on woodblock printing — both traditional relief carving and the experimental variants developed in postwar East Asian printmaking — and across her career she has built a recognizable visual vocabulary characterized by smooth fine white lines that twist and meander across the printed surface, creating extraordinary order shown through tidy lines and a rich sense of space in seemingly plain composition. Her prints have been described by critics as miscellaneous notes on life or records of her inner feelings; she has stated that she finds comfort in the act of woodblock cutting whether happy, angry, sad, or delighted.

Lin's awards trajectory in Taiwan has been substantial. She received the Golden Seal Prize from the Printmaking Society of the Republic of China in 2000, the Golden Tripod Medal from the ROC Painting Association in 1991, the Special Prize at the Beijing-Taipei Graphic Art Exhibition in 1991, and the Grand Award from the Printmaking Society of the ROC in 1987. Her early career awards include 1st Prize in Printmaking at the Taiwan Provincial Art Exhibition in 1977, 2nd Prize in Watercolor from the Ministry of Education in 1976, and 2nd Prize in Printmaking at the Taipei International Women's Club Art Exhibition in 1975. She has been honored multiple times in the ROC International Biennial Print Exhibitions in 1983, 1989, and 1991.

As a curator she has organized major exhibitions of contemporary Taiwanese print, including Printmaking Grace of Ancient Taipei (2013), Interface • Imprint (2012), and the Monumental Ideas in Miniature Books series. Her solo exhibitions have been held across Asia, Europe, and North America since 1987 — Belgrade, Tokyo, Taipei, and U.S. venues among them. Her work is held in the collections of the Taiwan Printmaking Society, the National Taiwan University of Arts, and other institutional and private collections in Taiwan and Japan.