Lin Chuan-Chu grew up in the rural landscape of Wanli, New Taipei City, where he began working on the family farm as a child. Walking barefoot along field ridges and laboring through the changing seasons, he came to know nature through direct physical experience.

In junior high school, editing the school magazine and reading classical Chinese literature opened him to a broader intellectual world. After entering the Chinese Painting Division at Chinese Culture University, he came to regard ink painting as a form of personal and spiritual cultivation. During his university years, he encountered the work of Huang Binhong and Yu Cheng-yao. He was particularly drawn to the directness and unadorned quality of their paintings, finding in them a sensibility close to his own and gradually establishing landscape as a central subject in his practice.

After graduating in 1990, Lin went to Beijing to study art history under Chen Shouxiang, Shui Tianzhong, Lang Shaojun, and Xue Yongnian. Immersed in classical Chinese culture, he studied Chinese art history at the Chinese National Academy of Arts, then housed at Prince Gong’s Mansion, formerly associated with Pu Xinyu. The experience also brought him into contact with the contemporary Chinese art scene. At the same time, extensive travel through China’s mountains and landscapes deepened his understanding of land and seasonal change through firsthand observation.

Lin’s education was never confined to a single lineage. His interests remained broad and open, extending across painting, literature, art history, and travel. From agricultural labor in Wanli and his early formation in literature and ink painting to art-historical study and journeys through China, these experiences established the cultural foundations from which his life and practice would unfold.

The 1990s marked a period of rapid growth in Chinese-language art publishing and cultural media. Alongside his own practice, Lin joined Diancang magazine as an executive editor, working extensively in art-historical research, artist interviews, and literary writing. He began teaching at the university level in 2003.

His editorial work brought him into direct contact with leading modern and contemporary Chinese artists including Wu Guanzhong, Liu Kuo-sung, Yu Peng, Zheng Zaidong, Luis Chan, and Wucius Wong, while also allowing him to witness the rapid development of contemporary Chinese art during the 1990s. The art-historical training he had received in Beijing, combined with years of interviewing artists and their families, later enabled him to draw on valuable firsthand material in his research on senior artists such as Pu Xinyu and Yu Cheng-yao, resulting in several artist biographies and scholarly publications.

During this period, artmaking, research, and writing became increasingly intertwined, shaping Lin’s identity as a contemporary literati painter: an artist, writer, and researcher whose practice moves across these fields.

In 2000, Lin moved with his family to Chicago. Living away from Taiwan prompted him to reconsider the land, family memories, and cultural identity of his homeland, as well as whether traditional ink painting could adequately express his own lived experience. This shift led him to reassess and expand his broader understanding of art.

Over the following decade, his practice moved beyond landscape painting into animation, photography, performance, and installation. Family, homeland, life, and death emerged as central themes, laying the groundwork for later bodies of work including Family Stories, Motherland, Rice for Thoughts, and The Barn of My Life.

The decade from 2002 to 2012 marked one of the most transformative periods in Lin’s practice.

Following the cultural dislocation of his years in the United States and the successive deaths of his mother and father, he turned increasingly toward family history, rural life, and his own experience of mortality. Buddhist reflections on life, death, and nature also gradually entered his work, while land, family, and life became recurring subjects.

At the same time, his practice expanded from ink and painting into photography, performance, and large-scale installation. His work was presented at institutions including the Accton Arts Foundation, Taishin Bank Foundation for Arts and Culture, Kuandu Museum of Fine Arts, Shanghai Duolun Museum of Modern Art, Museum of Tomorrow, and Museum of Contemporary Art Taipei. Across these projects, Lin developed a cross-media practice grounded in personal experience while responding to increasingly complex exhibition spaces.

After decades of art-historical research, literary writing, cross-media experimentation, and large-scale museum exhibitions, Lin gradually shifted his focus toward landscape sketching from 2013 onward. For him, nature contains an inexhaustible formal richness: the contours of mountains, the growth of plants, changing light, and seasonal rhythms all provide essential material for painting. What matters is not the reproduction of inherited brushwork, but sustained observation on site, through which painting can reconnect with land, time, and life.

Lin has described painting as the medium in which he feels most fluent and free. After working across installation, animation, photography, and performance, his return to the canvas allowed him to recognize the possibilities of painting with renewed clarity. He considers the development of his painting during this period to be unlike any previous stage of his career.

Looking back over more than four decades of practice, Lin has never moved far from the land. From his rural upbringing in Wanli to art-historical study in Beijing, cross-cultural experience in the United States, and years of experimentation across media, he ultimately returned to sketching from life. Painting has become a way of moving through mountains and landscapes, immersing himself in the natural world.