Fanyu Lin—a young Chinese-born, New York-based painter, writer, therapeutic art coach, and designer—incites a viewing crisis for many art world stalwarts. How can we possibly take seriously artwork that is so, well, healthy in both its origins and its effects? For this artist—trained in architecture at the Central Academy of Fine Arts in Beijing and Columbia University in New York—offers viewers primarily what we might call “palliative abstraction,” gestural paintings that sweetly beguile the eye and calm the spirit, produced by an artist who displays no outward signs of social alienation or psychic distress. Doesn’t she know, poor thing, that this is not how the global contemporary art game is played?

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In fact, Lin is far from naïve. At the FLAG Art Foundation and the Hill Art Foundation, both in New York, and in the pages of the Financial Times, to whose Chinese edition she contributes regularly, Lin has discussed the workings of the global art system with a number of high-level insiders. These include collector and philanthropist Glenn Fuhrman; Dirk Boll, Deputy Chairman of 20th- and 21st-Century Art at Christie’s international auction house; Katherine E. Fleming, President and CEO of the J. Paul Getty Trust; Joanne Heyler, Founding Director and President of The Broad; Colin Bailey, Director of the Morgan Library & Museum; and Max Hollein, Director and CEO of the Metropolitan Museum of Art. In addition, Lin’s interactive image-and-sound project “hOMe”™ was presented at the World Economic Forum in San Francisco in 2022.

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It is one thing to understand how galleries, auction houses, foundations, and museums interact; it is quite another to dutifully adopt the approved model of a 21st-century artist. Today’s avant-garde—supposedly predicated on the will to challenge, interrogate, subvert, and transgress—is in fact ruthlessly intolerant of artists who violate its own critical ideology and clubby rules. Do you have professional standing in some field other than art? Is your work pleasing to the general public? Are you able to interact comfortably, on their own terms, with members of the socioeconomic elite? Do you consider art—both its making and its viewing—a means to better psychological adjustment, an aid to well-being? If so, you are guilty of heresy and are likely to be treated as a pariah in the global contemporary art milieu.

 

This could be a serious problem, or it could be the genesis of a much-needed corrective. Lin’s refusal of the dominant art-career paradigm may stem from her non-Western cultural background, from her lack of standard art-school indoctrination, from an infatuation with old-fashioned beauty, from a confidence in her own intuitive aesthetic—or from a mix of all these factors and more. In any case, her eschewal is illuminating, because it forces us to consider what the prevailing template for art and artists really is, and how much human experience it excludes.

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Progressive artists would probably say that Lin is stuck, formally, in the Abstract Expressionist mode of the mid-20th century. She doesn’t make work by tampering with DNA or conversing with AI; her concerns are not explicitly linked to social justice throughout the world. (Interestingly, these objections are not raised against in-group abstractionists like Mary Weatherford and Laura Owens. Why?) Ironically, the skeptics’ own hoary artistic mandate derives, basically unaltered, from the late 19th century revolt against the French Academy. That is when self-styled bohemians first defined themselves and their agenda, paradoxically willing into reality a worldwide community of outsiders, loners, and wanderers. (“Global nomad” remains a PR honorific to this day.) Meanwhile, fellow citizens trying to live regular lives became an object of ridicule, the vanguard’s most reliable foil: “Épater la bourgeoisie!”

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This odd artistic stance came to be de rigueur, even definitive, despite the fact that it is a historical anomaly—artists in virtually all other places and times have acted as skilled proponents of their society’s values, not as adversaries. By now, more than 160 years after the first Salon des Refusés, the vanguard’s brash cause has grown superannuated and quaint. Worse yet, surveying current biennials, critical publications, and social media posts suggests that an art of perpetual critique and provocation has fostered a way of life mired in constant suspicion, a whole subculture of complaint and cancellation, rather than an ethos of human fulfillment. The movement that overthrew the old Academy has itself become the new orthodoxy, the new Academy—and a remarkably unhappy one.

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In contrast, one searches Lin’s oeuvre in vain for signs of significant distress—which is to say, for compliance with the ongoing fad of glorifying personal and communal discontent. Instead, her paintings convey either a moderate degree of tribulation (expressed in roiling brushstrokes) overcome by resolute positivity (luscious colors and an overall compositional balance), or else a sheer force-of-nature vitality that overruns all borders and restrictions, including the pictures’ physical edges.

 

The drama plays out in various ways. Lin’s acrylic-on-canvas diptych Romance (2023), for example, has a certain storminess—what romance doesn’t?—spilling out in emotional swirls at the picture’s center and drops of blood-red paint on the surface. Yet overall the disturbances, bathed in vermillion, white, and aqua, seem no more threatening than those in a Netflix rom-com. Skeptics might consider Love Liberates, a gestural triptych from 2024, to be a whitewash, thematically as well as chromatically. (Where is that liberty for the many trapped and abused “life partners” who end up in courtrooms?) Like the earlier Love Is Life-Giving (2023), done in shades of pink, rose, and peach with swirls of white, the work could use the word “true” inserted at the beginning of  its optimistic title. But maybe, for Lin, that qualifier goes without saying. Grittier in every way, certainly, is her large and ominous I’ll Protect Her from You (2023), an abstract tangle of black, reds, and white, demonstrating that the artist’s vision is not totally Pollyannaish.

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This is an ongoing dialectic in Lin’s practice. Thus the almost too nice Garden of Poems (2023)—four adjacent panels of jumbled, twisting marks in pinkish reds, gold, white, and chartreuse—is conceptually offset by the similarly composed but rougher and darker triptych Dragon (2023). In Chinese tradition, dragons are powerful, fearsome protectors, mirroring in their own appearance the very terribleness they were born to ward off. Venerated for this spiritual policing, the mythic creatures facilitate balance and harmony, good luck and prosperity, wisdom and knowledge. Rarely do they go rogue and have to be killed.

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The “Heart Blossom” series, comprising seven small abstract tondos, combines two other Asian references—blossoms, traditional symbols of the ephemerality of all beauty and life; and the Heart Sutra, one of the most widely read Buddhist texts, a meditation on the ultimate emptiness of existence. The works’ round shape, like that of the grisaille “Circle” paintings (2023), bespeaks cyclic perpetuity and noumenal perfection, qualities accessible only through contemplative transcendence. Fall on Me (2024), however, with its grayish hint of a bent-over body at center, references a song sung by Andrea and Matteo Bocelli, an oblique mediation on love and parenthood, dependency and support, here in the everyday world.

 

Occasionally, Lin turns to stylized figuration. “The Embrace” (2024), a suite of seven small watercolors, focuses on a pair of sketchy, quasi-abstract nude figures. Reclining and enfolding each other, these lovers embody the universal act of human twining, their race and gender shifting freely, indeterminate from image to image. The painting Herselves (2023), featuring two reclining nude women (or the same languid young woman seen from two points of view), calls to mind Baudelaire’s “Invitation to the Voyage”:  

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   The world drifts to sleep

In a warm gentle light.

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           There all is order and beauty,
                       Luxury, calm, and voluptuous ease. 

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Similarly, in the dreamy acrylic-on-canvas triptych Women and Dog (2023), the specific anatomies become difficult to discern; what matters is the encircling swoop of lines and the matching hues of human and canine bodies united in carnal repose. Such images could give even the bitterest cynic a tingle of sentiment, a glimmer of hope.

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This is not to say that Lin’s worldview is necessarily right. Correctness, factual or ethical, is probably not the correct thing to ask from artists, whose prime contribution—exasperating and vast—lies in increasing the sum total of our imaginative possibilities and vicarious experiences. On that count, doubters could argue that Lin ignores or suppresses too much: the whole dark side of life; the id, both individual and collective; the crimes of economic exploitation and imperialistic history; inequity and evil. That’s a risky choice. Since the 18th century, Western art criticism has tended to favor the Sublime (the mountaintop view that surveys all that can annihilate us) over the Beautiful (the timeless ideal of symmetry, smoothness, and just proportion), to say nothing of its poor step-sister, prettiness, condemned to keep company with cuteness and kitsch. In contrast, Lin’s work helps to provide a counterbalance to the art world’s current moralistic shaming and End Times visual rhetoric, a saving shift of ballast to right our floundering cultural galleon. 

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Take, for example, all that is implied by Lin’s “Flow,” her most multifaceted project to date, encompassing a dozen acrylic paintings as well as numerous works on paper, some in orange-red sumi ink, some in black. These calligraphic-style pieces remind us that Chinese tradition pairs writing and painting as twin “arts of the brush,” both manifesting the flow of qi (vital energy) from the cosmos through the artist’s mind, body, hand, and inscribing implement. In 2023, Lin emphasized this connection by presenting a selection of her works from that year in a mini-catalogue titled Abstract Chirography, a direct reference to the study of handwriting. The brochure’s color reproductions are prefaced by excerpts from a 1959 essay by Fluxus founder George Maciunas, who links abstraction to a primal expressive and communicative impulse that predates writing. (Lin once worked at the Fluxus Foundation in New York as a curator and researcher.) That melding of speech act and pictorial gesture implicitly places Lin in the lineage of Hans Hartung, Mark Tobey, and Herman Cherry. 

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Graphic dynamism also infuses works such as Lin’s 24 small thick-stroke “Gold” sumi abstractions and her calligraphic Fall (2023), done on 70 small sheets of paper, also in gold sumi ink. The latter is a reminder that the artist sometimes—for instance in several “Flow” pictures—makes structurally unusual works, in which a single abstract composition is spread across a grid of discrete surfaces (canvas squares or sheets of paper) that can then be shown either separately or compositely. Perhaps pixels have affected her apprehension after all. In Lin’s 28-unit “Heart” series, each paper sheet bears a flowing black-ink configuration resembling a tsao shu (grass script) character, the fastest, most energetic, and most difficult-to-read cursive style of Chinese writing. As so often in this artist’s work, there is also an off-setting element: here, Lin’s rectilinear red-ink seal placed foursquare in the lower left corner of each image as a visual anchor. A traditional corollary of the flow-of-qi theory is that one can infer the moral character of the artist from the nature of their compositions and marks.

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By now it should be clear that Lin, while fully aware of “global contemporary” (actually vanguard Western) expectations, chooses to operate with a different—or, rather, an additional—frame of reference, perhaps even two or three other conceptual frameworks that challenge and complement each other. From a Chinese perspective, her many humanistic activities (painting, writing, curating, designing, teaching, meditating, promoting art therapy) cast her as a modern-day version of a Confucian junzi—an exemplary person whose behavior is proper, fair, cultured, and socially beneficent.

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Oddly—or perhaps not so oddly, given Lin’s bi-culturalism—the Confucian prescription dovetails with that of Aristotle. In his Ethics, the quintessential Western philosopher argues that eudaimonia, or happiness, is the greatest human good, the only one sought for its own sake alone. (All others—health, wealth, esteem, power, love, etc.—are instruments for helping us attain a happy state.) This eudaimonia comes, he contends, from fulfilling our highest human potential, from engaging in the activities that are right for us. From this, all else follows: ethical conduct, friendship, magnanimity, even good politics.

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It is fascinating to note that these Confucian and Aristotelian concepts, treating virtue as an activity, were echoed in the clinical research analyzed by Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi in his 1990 book Flow: The Psychology of Optimal Experience. There the University of Chicago psychologist equated happiness with a flow state (Lin’s creative method and frequently her subject), an experience well known to artists and athletes alike. We enter that mentally heightened zone when we confront, one after the other in rapid succession, challenges that are real and significant, but that we believe we can overcome through talent, training, and concentration. Each success adds to our immediate exhilaration and, afterwards, to our residual sense of felicity. One conquers happiness (to use Bertrand Russell’s terminology) not by dwelling endlessly on the desired condition but by taking the actions that induce it.

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Lin is prone to discussing her artwork in slightly cloying New Age terms, as if it served a passive well-being associated with meditation, soft music, massages oils, and scented candles. (An upcoming show is titled “Introspective Growth: Discovering the Possibilities.”) At face value, this would make her practice a popular update of Daoism’s wu wei, a spontaneous accord with nature and the universe, which is certainly a reputable philosophic antecedent. But one glance at Lin’s diverse resume, or one sustained encounter with her fiercely energetic yet empathetic paintings, reveals a way of life devoted to activity—to doing things that gratify the doer and benefit other people. What a refreshing alternative that simple gift is to the discontent and sanctimony, self-righteousness and retribution, that currently pervade the international art world.

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