MAID OUT OF ICE BY LIN NI

Lin Ni (Last,First; b.1994) is a non-binary identified trans-woman artist working with filmmaking and water. They approach their subject through physical and fictional insertions into liquid bodies such as time, space and water bodies. They are drawn toward the gentleness in poetic relations, such as the momentary blue during Nordic twilight, making wood fires, tasting snow, and deep skin dives in the ocean, while evaporating binary, colonial practices through art-based action. When their skin is in contact with various forms of hydro-perception, their body wanders into the world, transitioning through states, genders, identities, colonization, war, pollution. They are interested in cross species relationships and raise awareness on the excluding and ruling process of hierarchy.


In 2018, they worked as an assistant to the curator at the Taiwan Pavilion of the London Design Biennale and later with the curatorial company Blue Dragon Art in Taipei. They received the Finland Scholarship and International Talent Lapland-U Scholarship to pursue the MA Sustainable Art and Design at the University of Lapland in Rovaniemi. Their recent salmon series exhibitions, "I am Salmon, Oncorhynchus gorbuscha W.I.P." and "I am Salmon, Oncorhynchus masou formosanus W.I.P.," have been showcased at the Ateneum Art Museum  in UrbanApa Festival and the Research Pavilion#5 in HIAP Augusta Gallery in Finland. They are known for short films such as "Traicee" (2021) and "The Water Dress" (2022), both of which they directed and acted in. Other works have been shown at Haus Der Statistik, Kunstkraftwerk, and Helmut Space in Germany, Herðubreið Gallery in Iceland, and independent festivals such as Flat Earth Film Fest. In 2023, they were nominated for the Chi-Po-Lin Film Award and the New Taipei City Documentary Film Award, for the feature film "The Water Carries me" under development.

“During insertion into cold water through slush waves hitting shore, the body first is restricted by liquid slush. Then the skin, sensitized by temperature near freezing point, experiences scratches from sharp, tiny blocks of ice. Passing the area of liquid slush pushed and gathered near shore line, the body enters a brief zone of freedom in sub-zero water without ice.“

This is a description from one of their experiences in cold water. In an ongoing project in Seyðisfjörður, Iceland, they used fishnets collected on site to make garments to wear while moving through -3°C water. They simulated the otherness of fishes through measuring, cutting, and tailoring used fishnet for their physical body. They experienced their own non-humanness by entering the water with only the tailored fish garment. Their skin was in direct contact with used fishnet’s color, smell, solidified fluids secretion from fish, as well as the coarseness and stretchiness that comes with synthetic fabric. Their body saw fishes pulled and dragged underwater. It’s only in retrospect that they acknowledged the silence required to reconnect with their experiences in the deep space of senses. Movements can shift their bodies' perceived ideas directly. Transnational, trans-territorial moves trigger awakening, cultural shocks and creative outpouring. Deep submersion induces changes in pressure, time perception and state of awareness. In these different motions, they direct and redirect according to their reorientation in dis-orientated habitats. They tell and re-tell their relations following the psychological transformation of their own experience. These designs provide frameworks for how they intuit a subject in question, an object in contact and how they navigate beneath the surface.