Lin Tianmiao is one of the most powerful female voices to emerge from and endure the vicissitudes of Chinese contemporary art over the past two decades. Since the mid-1990s, she has been making labor-intensive, traditional craft-based sculptures and installations breathtaking in their obsessive and dangerously precise transformation of everyday objects.

In anticipation of her upcoming performance for the Whitney Independent Studies Program Studio Exhibition (May 20 – June 3, 2017), I sat down with Emma at her ISP studio to talk about the evolution of her practice and the state of critical art in light of the alt-right’s embrace of postmodern performativity.