Hive Center for Contemporary Art is honoured to announce the retrospective of Richard Lin Show Yu at Hive Shanghai, on view from 8 November to 12 December, 2023. This exhibition is organised by Laura Shao Yiyang, director of International Development at Hive. The exhibition is supported by the Estate of Richard Lin Show Yu, with special recognition to Jean-Claude LIN Lü-Dun, Jean-Pierre LIN Sao Ming, Sumi A R LIN, Katya LIN LODGE, and Malu R J LIN SWAYNE. This retrospective focuses on Richard Lin Show Yu’s significant works from the 1950s to the 1980s. It is Lin’s first major exhibition at a gallery in mainland of China, also his second time showing at Hive, following the 2015 major exhibition of Chinese abstractionists, “The Boundaries of Order”.

It is a very daunting task to write about Richard Lin Show Yu. This prologue represents a distillation of my own reflections, regarding key aspects of his work experienced as a childhood bystander observer and later musings over the decades. Where possible, within the limitations of this brief account I draw upon archival sources within the Richard Lin Show Yu Estate Archive as pertinent illustrations. For the most part I am attempting to create an image of ideas and influences supporting his creative energy. The Estate of Richard LIN Show Yu would like to thank Hive Center for Contemporary Art, and in particular Laura Shao Yiyang, Director of International Development, and her team, for this exhibition. It has been a pleasure to collaborate with Hive.

Childhood and adolescence for Richard Lin Show Yu was marked by a succession of educational displacements including an early childhood period in a Japanese household; late adolescence boarding in Hong Kong to attend the Diocesan Boys’ School and then boarding at Millfield School in Somerset, UK. In these childhood years away from home, a lasting love for music, singing along to Chinese Classical Opera contributed to the building of a protective inner sanctuary that would later accompany his most creative and productive all-night sessions of painting and constructing in the studio.

If the language of architecture in post-war London taught RLSY about function, space and form, surely calligraphy physically educated his eye and hand to deliver the faultless proportions and spacing with his elegant cursive calligraphy from a young age. Another important influence was growing up in a complex of traditional Chinese compound houses. Freehand architectural sketches, some with water colour washes, notably of the city of Bayeux and its cathedral pre-figure the later and much larger major ‘Dark Sun’ series. Spanning 1933-1958, as a member of Artists International Association (A.I.A), a number of RLSY contemporary works are displayed alongside Pablo Picasso, Georges Braque, Joan Miro, and many others invited to celebrate the A.IA 25th anniversary.

The atmospheric suns and moons, clouds and forests, deep bold colours ebbing and flowing and bleeding into each other, some of epic dimensions-the ‘old masters’-of his Gimpel Fils days followed by later geometric coalescence into sharp-edged shapes and polished surfaces leading to his multimedia ‘constructivist’ works of canvas, paint, metal and Perspex and the ‘many colours of white’ defining the Marlborough Gallery epoch. Mathematical conceptual frameworks recurred in conversations about structural relationships and proportion, including the geometry of the Golden Mean and the irrational number √2 i.e. the length of a diagonal to a 1×1 square. These mathematical ideas influenced Richard Lin Show Yu’s aesthetics of intervals and the relationships of one space with another. Contemporaneous to his ‘constructivist’ works and in complete contrast are the ‘gestural’ studies comprising instantaneous works of squeezed oil-paint tubes onto stiff glossy paper placed on the floor, literally creating a work in the moment and with great energy or ‘Chi’ in RLSY’s words resulting in neo-calligraphic expressions.

‘The decision is more important than the incision’: a surgical maxim which applies precisely to incision ‘drawing’ but as with gestural works, Richard Lin Show Yu worked slowly to construct his white and mixed media works. By contrast the gestural incision and more classically graphic works depended on rapid spontaneous accuracy. He used an opportunistic economy of time and materials to determine his next works which depended on varying temporal characteristics at different stages of fruition, planning on the blank pages of old catalogues or envelopes. He is said to have worked with multimedia, but the medium he used most was ‘Time’.

Jean-Pierre LIN Sao Ming林少明

London, UK

14.10.23