Jinyao Lin

Artist

Jinyao Lin · jinyaolin.info ↗

Raster

raster.art/artist/jinyao-lin ↗

Based

Born 1973, Taipei, Taiwan. Based in Taiwan

Practice

Generative art, composition, sound, interactive media, performance, and digital installation

Now

Assistant Professor, College of Innovation and Design, National Taiwan University

In the set

Metaphysics ↗ · 200 editions

Links

Full bibliography ↗

Jinyao Lin’s practice developed through composition, technology art, computer science, and multimedia production. An exhibition catalogue identifies him as a composer and new media artist born in Taipei in 1973, while an earlier theatre profile records his music and fine-art training at Taipei National University of the Arts and doctorate in computer science from National Taiwan University.¹² These overlapping disciplines are not incidental credentials. They describe a working method in which rhythm, programmed behavior, image, sound, and performance remain closely connected.

Lin has characterized his movement across media as continuous rather than a sequence of career changes. In a 2022 interview, he recalled an early interest in both digital technology and art, longstanding work with generated image and music, and teaching digital tools during the late 2000s.³ His trajectory therefore places blockchain-based generative art within a much longer engagement with computational culture.

From sound to systems

Before Metaphysics, Lin was prominent in Taiwan’s experimental sound and interdisciplinary performance networks. A 2019 profile described a practice spanning music, dance, theatre, moving image, animation, and installation, supported by training in composition and multimedia technology.⁴ At C-LAB, he directed projects that joined sound research to public performance, including a concert developed with IRCAM-related spatial-audio infrastructure and three-dimensional imagery.⁵ In 2020 he also curated the Taoyuan Technology Art Festival, framing everyday environmental sound through digital artworks, performances, workshops, and talks.⁶

This history clarifies the visual logic of Lin’s generative work. Movement is treated as composition, repetition as rhythm, and variation as a temporal event. A podcast interview released shortly before Metaphysics explicitly situated his Web3 activity in relation to earlier new media practice rather than as a break from it.⁷ The same continuity appears in Intimate, described by KEF as an experimental project that generated visual and sonic elements in real time.⁸

Metaphysics

Released through Art Blocks Presents on 7 December 2022, Metaphysics comprises exactly 200 editions.⁹ The project converts the concept of qi, understood here as an imperceptible vital force, into an organic field of computational motion. Lin’s system deforms, shifts, and rotates its constituent forms, searching for coherence inside apparent disorder. Its principal movement derives from Cloud Hands, a flowing Tai Chi sequence, so the algorithm unfolds less like a static picture than a slow exercise performed across the canvas.¹⁰

The results resist the hard geometry often associated with code-based imagery. Layered forms gather, bend, and circulate, producing surfaces that can suggest vegetation, calligraphy, cellular growth, or weather without settling into illustration. A Taiwanese critical introduction emphasized this handmade, warm, and analog-like quality, as well as the works’ use of openness and quiet within a digital medium.¹¹ What appears organic is nevertheless procedural: p5.js organizes gradual transformation, while optional animation makes the system’s latent temporality directly visible.¹⁰

Live on Art Blocks: metaphysics-by-jinyao-lin ↗

Embodied computation

Metaphysics is best understood as an encounter between abstraction and embodiment. Its code does not depict qi as a fixed symbol. Instead, the work proposes that energy becomes legible through relations among rotation, displacement, density, and pause. This approach extends Lin’s experience in sound, where an unseen structure is apprehended through duration, and in performance, where form emerges through bodies in motion.

That synthesis also complicates any simple distinction between traditional reference and technical experiment. Tai Chi supplies a movement principle, not decorative imagery. Computation supplies a responsive structure, not merely a production tool. Across 200 outcomes, the system repeatedly stages the same proposition: an algorithm can model neither life nor metaphysics literally, but it can organize conditions in which viewers perceive continuity, tension, and change.

Bibliography

The references cited in this essay are listed below. For the complete bibliography see the Jinyao Lin links page ↗.