Hila Lulu Lin

Photograph by Hila Lulu Lin

Hila Lin (later Lulu Lin) was born on Kibbutz Mishmar HaEmek. When she was two years old, her parents were sent to Qazvin, Iran for three years as aliyah emissaries. When the family returned to Israel they moved to Kfar Bilu. Lulu Lin studied at Bezalel Academy of Arts and Design in Jerusalem in 1986–1989.[1]

She lives and works in Tel Aviv. Her partner is the artist Hanna Farah-Kufer Bir'im.

Lin works in various artistic areas in local culture and her works has had a remarkable effect in Israeli art.[2] Until Lin, in Israeli art, it was rare to deal with internal organs of body or connect them to architecture or transformation processes as they performed. She continually deals with body, sexuality, alienation, and detachedness, and the body of her works are sculpture, poetry, drawings, photographs, video works, and her later works - express a personal aesthetic that breaks normative boundaries.

Her artistic-surrealistic language is expressed in crossbreeding and manipulations that she creates in her body in front of a camera, processes computer simulations or expresses words in her poems, with rhetoric that combines erotica, fear, distress and rejection.[3]

Her work echoes the trend of surrealism and Dada of the first half of the 20th century, but at the same time her artistic language speaks out beyond the trends of the era.[4]

Lynn emerged in the scene in the late 1980s, with self-documentation video art including brusque images. She used her body as a way of presenting a body that is an infinite creative space that allows us to point to 'polar' tension between strangers and sellers, clean and impure, life and death, external and internal, large and small.

Her first solo, "The Voice of the Right" (1992), Lin presented sculptural objects made of various items, it was not conventional leave, but rather interrupting breaks between organic and synthetic, concrete and fictional, pleasurable and delightful. Her aesthetics get deeper into more physical direction later on, which already used as objects.

In "No More Tears" (1994), video work which was shown in the exhibition "Metasex 94: Identity, Body and Sexuality" (1994) sensuously expressed the experience of female embodiment in an erotic way. Lin manipulated an egg yolk on her body: the artist slowly rolls an egg yolk along her arm and into her mouth; then, gently easing it out of her mouth and repeated on other side.[1] "Cold Blood" (A Poem in Three Parts), in 1996 created a moment before of Prime Minister Yitzhak Rabin's assassination. The hedonistic character of Tel Aviv's seashore was juxtaposed with the sacredness of the Dome of the Rock, the most sacred Muslim site in Jerusalem. Both iconic landscapes were depicted under raw, bloody skies.[3]

At that time, Lin refused to give any interpretation to her work, and insisted on her right of movement and definition of identity without belonging to any art group.[2] Nevertheless, she was characterized as: "A provocative challenge to the limited notion of women as mothers and nurturers, this sensuous back-and-forth demonstrated an embodied continuity between inside and outside, linking the passions and pleasures of food with those of sex."[5]

Around the year 2000, Lin expanded the range and size of her works which also became more political, with materials from the public sphere entering and affecting her style.

In her art and poetry, Lin uses her own designed font for her work.

• 1988-1994 America-Israel Cultural Foundation
• 1992 Prize for a Young Artist, Yad Lebanim Museum, Petah Tikvah and Ministry of Education
• 1995 Kadishman Young Artist Award on behalf of the American-Israel Cultural Foundation
• 1998 Minister of Education and Culture Prize for Visual Arts
• Arthur Goldreich Prize winner
• 2002 Isracard Award, Tel Aviv Museum of Art for an Israeli artist

• Official website
• Hila Lulu Lin at the Israel Museum. Retrieved February 2012
• Art of Hila Lulu at Europeana. Retrieved February 2012
• Hila Lulu Lin at the Museum of Art, Ein Harod