For a long time Lin Tianmiao worked in the United States, before returning to China at the end of the 1990's with her husband, Wang Gongxin. The couple often works together in their studio-residence on the outskirts of Beijing. In order to survive in New York Lin Tianmiao worked as a textile designer. This measure of survival lent her life another aspect: awarding her skills in a certain visual language, and alerting her to the need for a unique identity. In her series "Focus and Go", Lin Tianmao makes use of a Black and white portrait blown up onto a canvas. She then covers the image very delicately, entirely or in part, with silk threads that she pins, like hairs, to the surface of the canvas. She successfully transformed the process of weaving and twinning employed for textiles into a visual language that corresponded with her own female identity. Lin Tianmiao is a significant force in contemporary Chinese woman art. Her works left the viewers with a film of fragile filaments that evokes, depending from one work to the next, the passage of time, lines of age, morbid decomposition, dust collected over time on an old cliché…provoking an unavoidable reflection on these subjects.